WHENIWASAGIRL 













































SYDNEY HARBOR BRIDGE 

Officially Opened In 1932 





mm 





























WHEN I WAS A GIRL 
IN AUSTRALIA 


CHILDREN OF OTHER LANDS BOOKS 

Independent Volumes With Characteristic Illustrations 
and Cover Designs . 12 mo Cloth 

There are many books about the children of other countries, 
but no other group like this, with each volume written by one 
who has lived the foreign child life described, and learned 
from subsequent experience in this country how to tell it in 
a way attractive to American children—and in fact to Ameri¬ 
cans of any age. 


WHEN 

1 

WAS 

A 

BOY 

IN 

CHINA, By Yan Phou Lee 

WHEN 

1 

WAS 

A 

GIRL 

IN 

ITALY, By Marietta Ambrosi 

WHEN 

1 

WAS 

A 

BOY 

IN 

JAPAN, By Sakae Shioya 

WHEN 

1 

WAS 

A 

BOY 

IN 

GREECE, By George Demetrios 

WHEN 

1 

WAS 

A 

BOY 

IN 

PALESTINE, By Mousa J. Kaleel 

WHEN 

1 

WAS 

A 

BOY 

IN 

BELGIUM, By Robert Jonckheere 

WHEN 

1 

WAS 

A 

BOY 

IN 

RUSSIA, By Vladimir Mokrievitch 

WHEN 

1 

WAS 

A 

BOY 

IN 

ROUMANIA, By Dr. J. S. Van Teslaar 

WHEN 

1 

WAS 

A 

GIRL 

IN 

HOLLAND, By Cornelia De Groot 

WHEN 

1 

WAS 

A 

GIRL IN 

MEXICO, By Mercedes Godoy 

WHEN 

1 

WAS 

A 

GIRL 

IN 

ICELAND, By Holmfridur Arnadottir 

WHEN 

1 

WAS 

A 

BOY 

IN 

PERSIA, By Youel B. Mirza 

WHEN 

1 

WAS 

A 

BOY 

IN 

SCOTLAND, By George McP. Hunter 

WHEN 

1 

WAS 

A 

BOY 

IN 

NORWAY, By John 0. Hall 

WHEN 

1 

WAS 

A 

GIRL 

IN 

SWITZERLAND, By S. Louise Patteson 

WHEN 

1 

WAS 

A 

BOY 

IN 

DENMARK, By H. Trolle-Steenstrup 

WHEN 

1 

WAS 

A 

BOY 

IN 

INDIA, By Satyananda Roy 

WHEN 

1 

WAS 

A 

BOY 

IN 

TURKEY, By Ahmed Sabri Bey 

WHEN 

1 

WAS 

A 

GIRL 

IN 

FRANCE, By Georgette Beuret 

WHEN 

1 

WAS 

A 

BOY 

IN 

ARMENIA, By Manoog Der Alexanian 

WHEN 

1 

WAS 

A 

GIRL 

IN 

SWEDEN, By Anna-Mia Hertzman 

WHEN 

1 

WAS 

A 

BOY 

IN 

KOREA, By llhan New 

WHEN 

1 

WAS 

A 

GIRL 

IN 

HUNGARY, By Elizabeth Pongracz Jacobi 

WHEN 

1 

WAS 

A 

BOY 

IN 

ENGLAND, By Ivan G. Grimshaw 

WHEN 

1 

WAS 

A 

GIRL 

IN 

BAVARIA, By Bertha Tauber Harper 

WHEN 

1 

WAS 

A 

GIRL 

IN 

AUSTRALIA, By Lorna M. Ryan 


LOTHROP, LEE & SHEPARD CO. 
BOSTON 







Lorna M. Ryan 




WHEN I WAS A GIRL 
IN AUSTRALIA 


By 

LORNA M. RYAN 


ILLUSTRATED FROM PHOTOGRAPHS 

/ 



BOSTON 

LOTHROP, LEE & SHEPARD CO. 














Copyright, 1932, 

By Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Co. 

All Rights Reserved 
When I Was a Girl in Australia 



Printed in U. S. A. 


SEP ^ 

©Cl A 54851 




CONTENTS 


I. When We Were Very Young . 9 


II. 

Our First School . 

• 

• 

25 

III. 

Right on the Edge of the 

Sea 

39 

IV. 

Australian Animals and 

Pets .... 

Our 

53 

V. 

Middle Harbor 

• 


68 

VI. 

A Holiday in the Bush 

• 


83 

VII. 

An Old Woman and 

Town . 

Sydney 

• • 

98 

VIII. 

Old Sydney 

• 


113 

IX. 

The Old Days 

• 


131 

X. 

A Lady from Tasmania 

• 


148 

XI. 

Holidays 

• 

% 

155 

XII. 

Another School 

• 


163 

XIII. 

Growing Up 

• 

• 

177 


5 






ILLUSTRATIONS 


Lorna M. Ryan 

Frontispiece 


FACING 

PAGE 

Young, New South Wales ) 
Manly Beach, N.S.W. ) 

• • 

24 

Outward Bound } 

Clifton Gardens and Sidney > 

• • 

40 

Harbor, N.S.W. ) 

Opossum Carrying Its Young 

• • 

56 

Platypus, Ornithorhynchus, or 

Duckbill 

66 

Australian Dairy Herd | 
Sidney Heads / 

• • 

72 

A Flock of Sheep 

• • 

94 

Mosman Bay ) 

The Gap / 

• • 

102 

Kangaroos at Toronga Zoological Park 

116 

Australian Aboriginals 

• • 

150 

Russell Falls 

• • 

168 

Jimmy Booka 

• • 

180 


7 






When I Was a Girl 
in Australia 


CHAPTER I 

WHEN WE WERE VERY YOUNG 

I shall always remember the first 
fishing-line I ever had, and the day my 
little brother made it for me. It was not 
really very different from others, but for 
some reason it stands out in my memory 
as the clearest of all my little-girl days. 
It was so bright; the sun shone on the 
leaves of the umbrella-tree in its tub at 
the foot of the verandah steps. Umbrella- 
trees do not grow in Sydney as a rule— 
my mother brought this one from her 
home in Queensland, which is much more 
tropical than New South Wales. The 

9 



10 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

wind blew the huge banana-leaves till they 
flapped against the dining-room window 
—the bananas came from Queensland, 
too—and the flowers of the purple Bou¬ 
gainvillea swayed against the house. 

I was just a very small person, but I 
remember sitting on the grass, the tough, 
rough grass called “ couch,” which grew 
like a springy carpet under the flame-tree 
in the garden; listening to the insects mak¬ 
ing a buzzing noise that never stopped; 
looking at the azaleas and the roses, piled 
like pink-tinted snow on the bushes; sniff¬ 
ing the perfume of the white morning- 
glories that trailed along the verandah 
roof; and watching a big bird called a 
“ kookaburra ” as it darted down to catch 
a tiny lizard and flew away with it in its 
bill. It laughed a long, loud laugh when 
it reached the top of a gum-tree across 
the road. Kookaburras always laugh, and 
that is why they are so often called 
“ laughing jackasses.” 


When We Were Very Young 11 

My brother, Frank, who was just a 
year older than I, had promised to make 
me a fishing-line, and I was waiting for 
him to come out of the house, where he 
had gone to get the things he wanted for 
the line. It was to be the first one I had 
ever had, and I hoped it would be a good 
one. 

Mother came out and sat on the edge of 
her favorite hammock in the corner of the 
verandah. She looked so beautiful to me 
that morning that after all this time the 
picture I have in my mind of her is still 
the one I saw then; the smile in her lovely 
brown eyes and the softness of the curls 
around her face have never changed to me. 
I pretended that I was staring at the red 
flowers that clustered like little fires on 
the flame-tree over my head, but all the 
time I was thinking of Mother, and 
wondering what it was that made me feel 
so queer that I wanted to cry, or laugh, or 
turn head-over-heels, or something! 


12 When I Was a Girl in Australia 


Presently Frank came pattering along 
the verandah with a penknife in his hand. 
“ First of all, we’ll cut a bamboo stick for 
a rod,” he announced, and I followed him 
to the bamboo hedge along the trellis that 
divided the front garden from the back. 
He did not say “ fish-pole,” because 
Australian boys call it a fishing-rod. 

We broke a nice willowy stick, and 
Frank cut the grass-like leaves away 
while I watched him. The wind swished 
through the bamboos and made them hiss 
and rustle together like dry reeds. My 
older sister, Grade, came and spread a 
cloth on the lawn where we were going 
to have a picnic lunch. I sat on my feet 
so that she would not see that I had 
taken my sandals off. Gracie was very 
strict about bare feet. But she did not 
notice me to-day. She was too busy try¬ 
ing to keep the cloth clear of leaves. They 
were falling from the gum-tree, because 
it was the Australian autumn month of 


When We Were Very Young 13 

April, and the gum-trees were preparing 
to shed their bark. Although no Aus¬ 
tralian trees are ever bare of leaves, as 
trees are in American winters, the blue 
gums slowly exchange old leaves for new, 
and some trees, like the flame-tree and the 
jackaranda, whose flowers are blue, have 
their leaves at one time and their flowers 
at another! 

When the fishing-rod was ready, Frank 
took a spool of thread out of his pocket, 
fixed it to the rod, and fastened a bent 
pin on the end. 

“ Is that what you are going to give 
me to fish with? ” I said. 

“ Well, you can’t fish, can you? ” he 
answered. “ You don’t think I’m going 
to waste good fish-hooks on you, do you? ” 

As a matter of fact, I did think he 
should give me “ good fish-hooks,” but I 
managed all right with the pin for a little 
while. And he gave me proper hooks 
later. 


14 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

Frank and I were together most of the 
time. All through the summer we hunted 
locusts. 

Whenever we went out, which was not 
often, because we had to play in our own 
garden, we always looked for locusts. 

Walking along the road in our white 
linen hats and blue suits—I mean, my 
blue dress and Frank’s blue suit—a locust 
voice would suddenly shrill from a gum- 
tree bough, and Frank would listen. 

“ It’s a Blue Monday,” he would say. 

“ No. I’ll bet it’s a Dromedary,” I 
would answer. 

“ All right, I’ll go up the tree and find 
out.” 

And up the tree he would go. He 
always had a box ready inside his pocket, 
in case he needed it. If by any chance 
the locust was silent when he reached the 
ground, Frank would shake the box until 
it began to sing again—probably from 
nervousness! I have never found out ex- 



When We Were Very Young 15 

actly where the sound came from, but I 
am pretty sure the locust did not make 
it by fiddling on its legs as they say the 
crickets do, although the noise is very like 
that of a cricket—only ten times louder. 

When he had succeeded in producing 
the song again, he would say, “ Now 
guess what it is.” 

I would listen attentively. Only a well- 
trained ear could detect one species from 
another, for they showed no outer dif¬ 
ferences whatever except in faint shades 
of color. 

“ Drummer? ” I would say at last. 

“ No—a Green Tuesday,” he would an¬ 
nounce, and then open the box for me to 
see the faintly green body and the pale, 
transparent wings of a little creature 
about three inches long and not unlike a 
fly in formation. 

Once we found a locust just coming 
out of the ground from its long sleep. 
Legend and, for all I knew, scientific 



16 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

truth had it that the locust lived in the 
earth for seven years. We were spell¬ 
bound as we knelt together in the hot 
dusty road and watched the funny brown 
forefeet slowly scratching away the soil, 
and the large round hind part emerging 
into the sun. It rested a little while, and 
then the brown shell split right along the 
back. The still-soft locust body and the 
crumpled-up damp wings were exposed 
to the warmth. Bit by bit the darker 
veins on the delicate yellow wings of a 
perfect Yellow Monday were spread out 
to dry. No sooner did it set up its first 
glad drumming than two pairs of eager 
hands had swept it into a collection! 

“ I wonder what it did under the road 
for seven years,” mused Frank, going 
home. 

We were never allowed to play any¬ 
where outside our own back garden, and 
only one or two other children in the 
neighborhood were permitted to play with 


When We Were Very Young 17 

us. Two little boys came in from next 
door sometimes. We never knew their real 
names; we always called them “ Arter 
Gitta ” and “ Jiddely Bingen.” The only 
thing I remember quite clearly about 
them was that their father used to go 
away for a few-months’ holiday every 
year to an island off the coast of Austra¬ 
lia, called Norfolk Island. The Prohibi¬ 
tion Law is enforced on Norfolk Island, 
and sometimes people find it good for 
them to stay there for a little while. Ap¬ 
parently Arter Gitta’s father did. We 
were always asking him if his father had 
gone to “ Norfygarlen ” yet. 

These boys were useful to us when we 
wanted to escape from our own garden 
for anything in particular. Their fence 
was also ours on one side, and we could 
climb over and reach the road through 
their place without being seen—if we were 
lucky. I remember one afternoon Frank 
and I were dressed in our best clothes, 


18 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

ready to go out with Mother. She told us 
to sit quietly on a seat until she was ready. 
For some time we stayed perfectly still. 
Our clothes were spotlessly white—little 
light-weight white sweaters (we called 
them jerseys) and white caps. Frank had 
short white flannel trousers, and I had a 
skirt. Our shoes and socks were white, 
too. It was not often that we were 
dressed like that. Suddenly Arter Gitta 
popped his head over the fence. 

“ There’s a baker’s cart run into a bike 
up the street! ” he yelled. 

Without another word Frank and I 
flew over the fence and over the lawn, 
through the green gate in the hedge, and 
into the road. 

Up to that time the roadway, rather 
off the beaten track, had been without a 
sidewalk, but just that day a brand-new 
asphalt pavement had been finished out¬ 
side the houses. Frank and I were not 
prepared for this. We both, hand in 



When We Were Very Young 19 

hand, went face-downwards into the wet 
tar! Curtain, please! 

One night when Frank and I were ly¬ 
ing in our beds on the back verandah, 
staring up at the stars and listening to the 
bullfrogs croaking in the pools of water 
which had gathered in the garden after a 
shower of rain, Mother came and sat on 
my bed. 

“ Aren’t you asleep yet, petsie? ” she 
asked. 

I said, “No, Mummy,” but Frank an¬ 
swered, “ Oh, yes, long ago, Mummy.” 

“Silly fellow!” Mother said to him. 
“ I saw your eyes wide open, looking at 
the stars when I came out.” 

“ What are the stars, Mummy? ” he 
said. 

She sat down on my bed, and I care¬ 
fully moved my feet over very close, so 
that I could wiggle my toes against her 
because, when I was very small, I wiggled 
in close to my mother every chance I got. 


20 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

“ I don’t really know very much about 
stars,” she said. I could see her lovely 
profile with the soft black curls above, as 
she cupped her chin in her hand. The 
moon shone brightly, and everything was 
white. “ Over there—that group of stars 
is the Southern Cross.” Frank and I 
jumped up to look. She slipped her arms 
around us, and we all looked up together 
at the stars, which are the national em¬ 
blem of our country. 

Just for a second we were very still. 
Little fleecy clouds drifted over the moon, 
so thin that they looked like wisps of lace. 
The five stars glistened clearly on a dark 
blue sky. The air was softly warm, but 
Mother gave us both a quick little hug, 
so tight that it made us catch our breath, 
and sent us under the covers again. 

“ Into bed again, girls and boys,” she 
said. “ I’m going to tell you a story 
about the stars.” Very quietly my sister 
Gracie, with her hair in a plait down her 



When We Were Very Young 21 

back, came and sat on the top of the steps 
that led to the garden, and my father 
leaned on the rail. He looked very tall, 
and his hair shone silver in the moonlight. 

“ This is an aboriginal story,” Mother 
went on. “ It used to be told in the 
blacks’ camps on the islands in the Great 
Barrier Reef. I heard it when I was a 
little girl in Queensland. They say that 
there were once two little aboriginals out 
fishing in their canoe when suddenly a 
huge shark came quite near them. They 
had a harpoon on the end of a long creep¬ 
er-palm rope, so they threw it into the 
shark’s back. Somehow or other the rope 
got tangled up with the canoe. The shark 
gave an extra sudden pull, and over went 
the boat, spilling the two boys into the 
sea. Feeling the canoe so light, the big 
fish made off for the open water beyond 
the Reef, towing it behind. Both the boys 
swam after it with all their might. Soon 
they crossed the coral wall that encloses 


22 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

the Reef and found themselves in the 
open Pacific. They had never been so 
far before. On and on went the shark 
with their little boat, and still they could 
not reach it. They swam until their arms 
were too tired to move. Nothing would 
make them give up following, and when 
the night came, they had reached the very 
edge of the sea. The sky came down to 
meet the water, and the shark went 
straight into it with the canoe and the two 
black boys behind him. That is what has 
made the Southern Cross! At least, an 
old black gin [woman] told me so.” 

I gave a great sigh. “ Tell us some 
more, Mummy,” I begged. 

“No more to-night, little maid,” she 
answered, but Daddy came over and sat 
on the end of Frank’s bed. 

“ While we’re talking about the South¬ 
ern Cross,” he said in his slow voice, 
“ how many of you know who chose it for 
our flag? ” 


When We Were Very Young 23 

“ Tell us, Dad,” gurgled Frank, snug¬ 
gling into the bed. We all hoped it would 
be a long story. 

“ About seventy years ago,” Daddy 
said to us, “ there were some very rich 
gold-fields down in Victoria. They were 
at a place called Ballarat. The govern¬ 
ment, which was a long way from the 
gold-mines and really didn’t know much 
about anything there, said that the miners 
had to pay a tax—a lot of money—for 
their gold. It made the men so mad that 
they wouldn’t pay it. As a matter of 
fact, it was rather too much to ask them, 
although people shouldn’t rebel against 
the government, really. Anyway, the 
miners got together and chose a chief 
called Peter Lalor. He could not let 
them fight under the Union Jack because 
that was the flag belonging to the King’s 
soldiers, so he made a new flag of his 
own. It was the Southern Cross on a 
strip of blue bunting, and the miners 


24 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

hoisted it at the battle called the Eureka 
Stockade, on the Ballarat Gold-fields.” 

“ We’ve got the stars and the Union 
Jack on our flag now, haven’t we, 
Daddy? ” said Frank. 

“ Yes—we all understand each other 
better now. But it’s time for little people 
to be asleep—so night-night to every one.” 

Daddy strolled away across the lawn 
with Gracie holding on to his arm, and 
after Mother had loosened our mosquito 
nets so that they hung over us like tents, 
she tucked the edges closely under the 
sides, whispered, “ Good night,” to us 
both, and ran into the garden after Daddy 
and Gracie. I saw their three heads over 
the top of the blue hydrangea flowers just 
before I closed my eyes. 




Young, New South Wales 



Manly Beach, N. S. W. 

The most popular bathing resort in Sidney. 






CHAPTER II 


OUR FIRST SCHOOL 

One morning I heard the postman’s 
whistle at the gate. You see, all the 
houses have hedges or fences with gates 
in them, and the mail boxes in the suburbs 
are always at the gate, so the postman has 
a shrill whistle which he blows to let you 
know there are letters for you. 

After I had brought the mail to 
Mother, she said, “ Come out on the ve¬ 
randah, little maid. I want to talk to 
you and Frank.” 

Daddy was there, sitting in the ham¬ 
mock. 

It was still early, and the grass outside 
sparkled with dew. The breeze was fresh, 
and it blew the perfume of belladonnas 
and jasmine into the house. 

25 


26 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

“ How would you two like to go to 
school? ” Daddy asked us, as we sat to¬ 
gether on the top of the steps. 

“Which school?” gasped Frank. 

“ When? ” I said. 

“ Well, we thought of letting you both 
start at Miss Williams’ next week.” 
Mother said it quite slowly, looking at us 
very closely all the time. 

I did not care for the idea very much, 
but Miss Williams’ sounded better than 
any other school would have, because it 
was just across the road from our house. 

“ Shall we have to wear our shoes and 
socks all the time? ” I asked. I just hated 
shoes! 

“ I think we can get over that. At 
any rate, you needn’t wear socks, you 
know. You mav have either sandals or 
sand-shoes, whichever you like.” 

That settled the shoe difficulty. 

When the day came, Mother took us 
by the hand, and we went through the 


Our First School 


27 


high, solid gate into Miss Williams’ 
school-garden. 

The school itself was a wooden building 
with a corrugated iron roof, standing 
away from the house where the family 
lived, in a bare plot of ground of its own. 
A pathway led to the teacher’s front door. 

Mother presented us to a fat, pleasant 
woman with a waist that sank right into 
the middle of her, like a sack tied with a 
string. Of course, we had known Miss 
Williams for a long time, but somehow 
she looked different that morning—more 
gentle than I had imagined. 

With a quick wave of her hand, Mother 
went out and left us to take our places 
in the class. 

There were only about fifteen children 
altogether, boys and girls, as we were, of 
kindergarten age. Arter Gitta was there, 
but not his brother. Jiddely Bingen was 
too old. He went to another school. 

I don’t know why the children always 


28 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

called Miss Williams “ Miss.” She was 
married, although we hardly ever saw her 
husband unless he came to take her place 
for a few minutes now and again. Every¬ 
body in the neighborhood called the little 
school “ Miss Williams’,” but its real 
name was Northcliffe. 

It has always been a puzzle to me to 
understand how I learned anything at 
school. I do not remember ever taking 
the slightest interest in my lessons. The 
song of the locusts outside and the call 
of the butcher-bird in the bush at the end 
of the road were far more arresting than 
the paper baskets we used to make, or 
the rhymes we had to learn. 

It was sometimes dreadfully hot in our 
schoolroom, but even that did not stop 
Miss Williams from giving us drill. She 
had a perfect mania for exercise. Every 
day we had to touch our toes and wave 
our arms to the strumming of her younger 
sister at the piano, while Miss Williams 


Our First School 


29 


puffed and puffed on her little platform, 
giving instructions. 

Nothing very much seems to have im¬ 
pressed me during the year Frank and I 
attended Miss Williams’, but at the end 
of the last term of the year something 
happened which I have never forgotten. 

We gave an entertainment. 

All our friends and relatives were in¬ 
vited. They sat in our school forms, while 
the platform became a stage. The actors 
came in through the door which was usu¬ 
ally sacred to Miss Williams alone. Miss 
Williams’ sister was at the piano, as usual. 
A curtain, drawn along the rods by Jid- 
dely Bingen, hung before the stage. 
Jiddely, who despised Miss Williams’ 
school and all who were in it, had con¬ 
sented to “ do ” the curtain as a very spe¬ 
cial favor; at least, so he said. Privately, 
Frank and I were certain that it was the 
one and only chance he would ever have 
of being so important. 


30 When 1 Was a Girl in Australia 

I felt like a pretty important stage per¬ 
sonality myself. When I came on to say 
my piece, with a long cheese-cloth gown 
and two lengths of silver tinsel crossed 
over the front, I walked forward with my 
head well up in the air. I remembered 
my lines perfectly: 

“ A man of kindness to his beast is kind, 

And brutal actions show a brutal mind. . . .” 

I said it all, staring straight at the ceiling. 
My sing-song delivery showed that I 
didn’t know what it meant, and I was 
pretty certain that nobody else did, either. 

I was very pleased to “be on the 
stage,” though, and I bowed very low to 
the audience as I finished. When the 
clapping began, our little dog, Sago, was 
so excited that he sprang on the stage and 
jumped all over me. Nobody knew that 
he had been hiding under one of the 
forms, and it took Jiddely Bingen a long 
time to get him out. 


31 


Our First School 

Naturally, with her weakness for gym¬ 
nastics, Miss Williams had arranged sev¬ 
eral displays of physical culture. The 
boys were in one by themselves, and the 
girls in another. There were also some 
performed by the picked experts of both 
sexes. 

I am sure Miss Williams never had a 
more difficult time than she did that night. 
Standing in the shadow of the mountains 
(they had been painted on cardboard for 
the occasion by Mr. Williams), she cried, 
“ One—two—three. One—two—three,” 
till her voice was hoarse. In the jumping 
numbers she jumped till the mountains 
shook with her weight in an effort to keep 
at least one or two of us doing the same 
thing at the same time. I never could 
keep in time, anyway, and I’m sure I was 
worse than ever at that “ concert.” 

Frank had to recite some Mother Goose 
rhymes. But he didn’t like it. There 
was no spirit at all in “ Little Jack Hor- 




32 When 1 Was a Girl in Australia 

ner ” or “ Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son,” 
according to Frank. He simply looked 
tired and mumbled through the words as 
fast as he could. Miss Williams gave his 
arm a good pinch when he came off the 
stage, and I have often wondered since 
how she had enough energy left even for 
that. 

The best “ act ” that night was Arter 
Gitta’s Scotch dance. He wore a regular 
tartan with a velvet jacket and a little 
cap with a ribbon, called a Glengarry 
bonnet. His shoes had buckles on, and he 
danced a reel that made us rock the 
schoolhouse with applause. 

After the performance was over, Miss 
Williams, looking very hot and tired in 
her muslin dress with a pale blue sash, 
came out in front of the curtain and made 
a speech. We all clapped loudly. It 
meant the end of the term, and the end of 
Miss Williams altogether for Frank and 


me. 


Our First School 


33 


We left that part of the suburb during 
the summer holidays of that year. 

The eight weeks of the summer holi¬ 
days in Australia begin two weeks before 
Christmas. We had all the usual festiv¬ 
ities, which are much after the English 
customs—turkey or poultry of some kind 
for Christmas dinner, with heavy fruit 
puddings and mince pies—‘but very often 
people have this meal in the form of a 
picnic if the weather is very warm. A 
week after the New Year we moved to 
another house. 

Frank and I had never had so much 
fun as we had on the day we moved. 

As soon as the mover’s van came to 
the gate, men began carrying out the 
furniture and setting it on the lawns and 
pathways. Very soon the whole garden 
was full of furniture. I kept finding toys 
that I hadn’t seen for a long time. In a 
dark cupboard Frank discovered one of 
his best marbles that had been lost for 



34 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

months. We hunted through every nook 
and cranny of the empty rooms. 

Mother and Gracie were very busy, 
wrapping things up and giving orders to 
the men. Two cleaning-women (behind 
their backs Frank and I called them “ the 
chars”) were scrubbing the floors and 
putting all the papers and rubbish in a 
big heap to be burned in the back garden. 
When it was fairly high, one of the 
women put a match to the pile, and gave 
me a long stick to push things back with 
if they fell out of the blaze. Frank got 
himself a stick as well. Mother did not 
know we had this job, because she was 
busy in the front of the house and our 
bonfire was behind the trellis in the back 
garden. 

We were having great fun. Most of 
the time we forgot to tend to the fire 
properly because we saw so many of our 
best things to be saved. Somebody had 
thrown a picture-book of mine into the 


Our First School 


35 


rubbish, so we fished that out just in the 
nick of time. Then I saw a basket, a per¬ 
fectly good basket of Mother’s. I was 
sure she had not meant that to be burned. 
We saved it. Pretty soon we had quite 
a collection of things saved. 

After a while something reminded me 
that we were supposed to be tending to 
the burning rubbish. I started to push 
and prod all the stray bits into the flames 
with great attention, when suddenly I 
looked up and saw that the vine-covered 
trellis which connected our house with 
Arter Gitta’s was on fire. The char¬ 
woman had lit the bonfire too close. 
Frank and I were terrified. 

In a very short time dense clouds of 
smoke rose above the house. Arter Gitta’s 
mother saw the blazing trellis, began to 
scream, and rushed into the house to call 
the fire-brigade. 

Meanwhile several other neighbors, 
seeing the smoke and hearing the screams 


36 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

and excitement, had also called the fire- 
station. 

The men who were moving the furni¬ 
ture chopped the fences and the trellis 
down. Helpers from all sides ran about 
with buckets of water. Frank and I had 
a basin and a pitcher which had been 
about to go in the van to the other house. 
Mother and Gracie, Daddy and the two 
cleaning-women, tore in and out with tin 
dishes and everything else that would hold 
a drop of water to pour on the blaze. A 
long procession scurried from the faucets 
in the laundry (Australian houses have a 
special place for washing) to the trellis 
fence. 

Within quite a short time there was 
nothing left of the fire but the smoldering 
wood and the smoke. But that did not 
stop the arrival of the fire-brigades. All 
that had been telephoned answered the 
call; at least three districts reported. 
Down the road they clattered. Every- 


Our First School 


37 


thing on wheels seemed to have halted 
outside our gate—the moving-van, the 
fire-engines, and all the bread-carts, milk- 
carts, and delivery wagons in the vicinity 
which had hurried to see the fire. All the 
hoys on bicycles and all the boys on foot, 
with all their dogs, were gathered in our 
back garden. The furniture was still 
scattered about the grass. The house was 
full of men in uniforms—firemen with 
helmets on, and policemen wanting to 
know what was the idea of creating ex¬ 
citement like that when there was no fire! 

Mother was glad when Daddy came in 
to help her explain how it all happened. 
Daddy’s voice was very loud and cheer¬ 
ful, and all the firemen—and a great 
many who were not—kept going into the 
dining-room and coming out, wiping their 
mouths on their sleeves. I heard one of 
them, as he was coming out, say to a 
baker, “ In the first room to the left.” 

Frank and I sat up on the gate and 




38 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

watched them all going away. One by 
one the fire-engines drove off. Most of 
the men were laughing, and I was glad 
that Daddy had been able to say the right 
thing to them in the dining-room, because 
I had been a bit afraid that somebody 
would ask Frank or me if we knew how 
the fire had started. 

The milkman who usually delivered 
our milk got back on the seat of his 
wagon and gave us a wink before he 
drove away. As I watched the drops of 
milk dripping from one of the faucets on 
the back, I could not help wondering 
whether he suspected us. It is only re¬ 
cently that some of the Australian dairies 
have begun to use bottles for milk de¬ 
livery. 

It was almost dark when Daddy took 
us to the street-car, and we set out for 
the new house. 


CHAPTER III 


RIGHT ON THE EDGE OF THE SEA 

My father was an architect, and a very 
clever one. He had studied his profession 
not only in Australia, but in England, 
Greece, and Italy. I still think he is the 
most artistic man I have ever known. 

He designed and built the house where 
I was brought up. 

We could hardly sleep the first night 
we were there because we all had bed¬ 
rooms of our own! To have my own room 
had always been an ambition of mine. 
And this one, though quite tiny, was per¬ 
fect. It had a casement window that 
looked right out over the water to Sydney 
Heads, with the first part of Middle Har¬ 
bor in the foreground; then the little 

39 


40 When 1 Was a Girl in Australia 

headland of Dobroyd with its lighthouse, 
and the entrance to the suburb of Manly; 
North Head and Middle Head, bush-clad 
and lonely; and away beyond it all—the 
blue Pacific. 

One door in my room opened into 
Grade’s, and the other, on the verandah, 
which was to be Frank’s. His bed was in 
one corner all to himself. As the days 
went by, Frank became less pleased with 
his “ room.” It was not sufficiently his . 
Unlike the old house, this one had only 
the one verandah, and it was not long 
before it grew to be the most important 
and most used place of all. 

The sliding glass windows that enclosed 
it looked out on the same view as my bed¬ 
room did. A flight of steps led down to 
the garden because the house was built on 
the slope. The front of it was almost 
level, but the back, where the verandah 
was, stood so high up from the ground 
that the laundry was built underneath. 



Outward Bound 

Sidney Heads, N. S. W. 



Clifton Gardens and Sidney Harbor, N. S. W. 







Right on the Edge of the Sea 41 

When we woke up on the first morning 
in the new house, we helped Mother to 
plant the bananas again. As usual, she 
had brought some roots with her. This 
time we had them on each side of the gate. 
When they grew into luxurious plants 
and bore long bunches of fruit, as they 
later did, they made a beautiful entrance 
with the torii-lke gate, painted green, in 
the shade of their enormous leaves. 

We were living now too far away 
from a school, so Grade, who had just left 
school altogether, had to teach us our les¬ 
sons every morning. 

As soon as breakfast was over, our 
books were spread out on a table on the 
verandah. For two hours my sister made 
us read and write and “ add up.” Frank 
worked wonderfully well for her, but I 
drew little men on my books and watched 
the sea-birds flying over the water. Even 
so, I think I learned as much during those 
hours as I ever did anywhere else. At 


42 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

any rate, sometime, somewhere, I have 
learned to write. I could read almost any¬ 
thing by the time I was seven. I am still 
trying to “ add up ” things—I do not 
think I shall ever learn, either! 

At the end of the two hours the day was 
our own. The rule of our strict seclusion 
was discarded. We were so far away 
from the crowds and so very near the 
beach that Mother soon found it was quite 
hopeless to try to keep Frank and me in 
the garden. 

We began collecting in earnest. Lo¬ 
custs hardly interested us any more. We 
had the sea, the beach, the rocks, and miles 
of virgin bush—all of them full of things 
to collect. If we still caught locusts, it 
was only half-heartedly, and we never 
kept them any more. 

There were three ways down to the 
beach. One was through a gully that 
started outside the front gate, ran along 
our neighbors’ fence for a distance, and 


Right on the Edge of the Sea 43 

then descended suddenly over jagged 
rocks to the beach, which was reached 
through a small thicket of bamboos. 
When it rained, the gully was a miniature 
torrent and the descent a roaring water¬ 
fall—we liked it best when it rained. The 
second way was through the neighbors’ 
property, and the third was down the face 
of the cliff below our garden. We used 
the last on rush occasions. There was a 
road, of course, but we never thought of 
it. Even so, it was not a real road. This 
out-of-the-way part of Mosman, which 
was the name of the suburb, had no roads 
in the real sense of the word. There were 
tracks through the bush, or level clay 
trails, nothing more. 

We wore bathing-suits and hats. If 
Frank put a little tunic and trousers on, 
and I a smock, over the suits, we thought 
we were very much dressed! 

Daddy bought us some handsome cases 
with glass tops to hold our specimens. 



44 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

We went in for birds’ eggs on a large 
scale. 

Frank had a sense of the bush-things 
which could be rivalled by nothing but a 
blackfellow’s. We spent long hours 
searching for birds’ nests. One day when 
we were some distance from home, he saw 
the rather plain female and the beautiful 
brilliant blue male of a species of warbler. 
He listened intently to their notes and 
made a sign to me to be quiet and follow 
him. 

“ They’ve got a nest somewhere,” he 
whispered. “ Come on.” 

They were small birds, and they twit¬ 
tered about a great deal from bush to 
bush. We crept after them. All along 
the foreshore they went, sometimes taking 
flights that kept us running and scram¬ 
bling as hard as we could to keep them in 
sight. Over rocks and gullies, round the 
fences of odd houses, over lonely road¬ 
ways, down to the very edge of the harbor, 


Right on the Edge of the Sea 45 

and up into the denser growths of the 
bush we tracked the little blue warbler 
home to his nest. It was a cozy thing, 
built quite low in a bottle-brush tree 
(banksia), but alas! it had no eggs in it. 
Frank eventually went back and found 
one, though. 

We were away from home almost seven 
hours on the expedition, and we went 
straight to bed afterward. 

Mother had several dried snake skins 
which she had brought from Queensland. 
Looking at them one day, Frank decided 
to collect some of his own. 

We already had four or five large boxes 
of caterpillars and silkworms under 
Frank’s bed, besides various other grubs 
and larvae which we were waiting to see 
develop into butterflies and moths. 

Snakes, however, are not easy to collect, 
because almost any method of killing 
them spoils their skins in some way. 

Frank very soon discovered that the 


46 When 1 Was a Girl in Australia 

only way to get perfect specimens was to 
catch them alive and chloroform them. I 
have been with him and seen him do it. 

One day we were going down the gully 
to the beach. It was an exceedingly hot 
day. The hot air hit the stones and rose 
again in waves. The locusts shrilled, and 
there was a smell of pungent Eucalyptus 
leaves. Everything under our feet was 
so dry and crisp that it snapped. The 
brittle blades of grass rustled as we 
touched them. 

“ Sh-h-h-sh! ” Frank hissed, and his lit¬ 
tle fingers gripped my arm like steel. 

A green tree-snake about five feet long 
lay asleep on a rock in the sun. 

Frank’s whole body grew tense. His 
eyes glittered. His mouth set in a thin 
line, and his hands were poised before 
him. On the very tips of his toes he crept 
towards the reptile. Every movement was 
so carefully balanced, every step so well 
chosen, that not a sound, hardly a quiver 


Right on the Edge of the Sea 47 

of the air, betrayed his advance. For a 
second he bent over the snake, gauging his 
distance and making his calculations. 
Swift as a flash, his fingers closed below 
the snake’s head, and his body prepared 
for the lashing which he knew would 
follow. 

Like coils of green rope, the snake 
flung itself about him—over his arms, 
around his neck, and about his waist. Its 
forked blue tongue darted in and out of 
its mouth. But Frank’s fingers held on, 
and he kept its head turned outwards. 

“ Go and get me that old bucket in the 
laundry,” he commanded, as we ran back 
to the house. “ And get the chloroform 
from under my bed.” 

When everything was ready and I was 
waiting with the cotton-wool all soaked 
with chloroform, he slipped the snake, tail 
first, into the bucket, still holding it by 
the head. With one hand he held a sheet 
of glass; he slid this over the top care- 



48 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

fully until all the snake was inside and 
there was only an inch or two left through 
which to get his fingers out. Then he 
released the snake. The soaked wool was 
dropped in, but the snake continued to 
move for some time. 

* 

“ We might as well leave it,” Frank 
said to me. “ Snakes never die till the 
sun goes down. I’ll get up early and skin 
it in the morning. It will be a beaut’ 
specimen.” 

At sunrise the following day he was 
busy with a sharp knife, a long board, and 
some salt. It took him hours of patient 
work to pin the skin out on the board, rub 
it well with salt, and dry it in the blazing 
sun. 

He did not always catch the snakes 
when they were asleep. He found small 
whipsnakes almost anywhere, and kept 
them in boxes or bottles on the verandah. 

Frank believed that absolute quiet was 
necessary during the periods of transfor- 


Right on the Edge of the Sea 49 

mation from the chrysalis to the butterfly. 
It was never quiet on the verandah, and 
after much argument I agreed at last to 
let him keep his collections under my bed. 
When I was in bed at night, I could hear 
the continual tiny movements of living 
things creeping up the sides of cardboard 
boxes. The beetles were the loudest. 
Beautiful, iridescent creatures, they were, 
some of them like precious stones, lapis 
lazuli and turquoise and emerald, en¬ 
dowed with movement. All night long 
they seemed to scale the walls of their lit¬ 
tle prisons and fall with a thud to the 
floor. 

Frank could hardly sleep for listening 
to the insects. He put his bed nearer the 
door to my room so that he could hear 
better. In the stillness of the early morn¬ 
ings he used to creep in to see what was 
going on, especially if he was expecting 
any of the rarer chrysalises to open, be¬ 
cause the butterflies had to be taken out 


50 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

of a crowded box and put in a safer place 
where there was a space for the wings to 
dry without injury. 

One night after more than usual activ¬ 
ity under my bed, I woke to see his pa- 
jama-clad legs sticking out from the midst 
of the boxes. 

“ What’s the matter? ” I asked sleepily. 

“ Only one of the snakes getting out,” 
he answered. 

Keeping all these creatures was a con¬ 
stant care for Frank and me. Almost 
every species of caterpillar and grub fed 
exclusively on one particular kind of leaf. 
The silkworms ate mulberry leaves; one 
kind of moth needed privet, and another 
caterpillar fed on nothing else but lemon 
leaves. This last was the worst anxiety 
of all. We had no lemon-trees, and the 
nearest ones were in a friend’s garden ever 
so far away. We got so tired of the trips 
that Frank thought of a brilliant plan. 
He begged quite a large branch of the 


Right on the Edge of the Sea 51 

lemon-tree, brought it home, and stuck it 
in the ground where it was shady enough 
to live for some time. He then tied the 
fastidious caterpillars to the branches 
with cotton. Very gently he slipped the 
loops around their waists—around their 
middles, anyway! And they got along 
very well, too. 

We were a long way from the shops. 
Most of the marketing was done over the 
telephone. There were also many things 
sold at the door; bread and milk, eggs 
and butter, and meat were delivered. The 
butcher took the order for the following 
day when he brought the meat for the 
present day. He came on a horse, which 
he tethered to the flame-tree near the back 
entrance. One morning my sister Gracie, 
who had never ridden a horse in her life, 
thought that she would like to try. She 
was wearing a blouse and white duck 
trousers. Frank and I watched her 
breathlessly. She had a scarlet ribbon 



52 When 1 Was a Girl in Australia 

round her head, and her long legs dangled 
at the horse’s sides. Before she had time 
to get both feet into the stirrups, it gal¬ 
loped away up the road. She could not 
stop. Mother and the butcher and the 
people next door were all in a frantic 
stated We were all sure that she would be 
killed. After running around the town to 
try to catch her, however, we finally saw 
her coming back. She was almost faint¬ 
ing when she was lifted to the ground, and 
her bare legs and ankles above her tennis 
shoes were torn and bleeding, where the 
stirrups had swung against her all 
through the mad ride. But she had man¬ 
aged to stay on the horse. She afterwards 
became, like my mother, a fine horse¬ 


woman. 


CHAPTER IV 


AUSTRALIAN ANIMALS AND OUR PETS 

The oldest bird in captivity lives in a 
suburb of Sydney. He is a cockatoo, and 
his name is Cocky Bennet. He is Syd¬ 
ney’s oldest inhabitant, and he is known in 
every part of the world because of his 
age, which is well over a hundred years. 
His bill is extremely long, and curved 
right in towards his chest. Cocky Bennet 
has not had a solitary feather for years 
and years, but if you go near him, he puts 
his head on one side and says, “ One more 
feather, and I’ll fly! ” 

There are many kinds of parrots in 
Australia. Their popular name is 
“ Cocky,” not “ Polly ” as in so many 
countries. The best known and the com- 

53 


54 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

monest is, of course, the sulphur-crested 
cockatoo, but the favorite pet is the beau¬ 
tiful gallah. It is grey with a rose-pink 
head. 

We always believed (whether it was a 
fact or not, I don’t know) that the gal- 
lahs with red eyes never talked. Ours had 
black eyes, and he talked incessantly, es¬ 
pecially to the cats if they came to get a 
drink out of his tin, which was usually 
outside his cage in a corner of the yard. 
The minute that he saw one, he used to 
rush down the bars, put his face per¬ 
suasively near the cat’s, and say softly, 
“ Whisper, Cocky, whisper.” If we whis¬ 
tled a Scotch tune that went “ There is 
nae luck aboot tha hoose . . .” Cocky 

would dance most gracefully on the sandy 
floor of the cage. 

At one time we had a tame jackdaw 
and also magpies, but they never did any¬ 
thing very exciting, except that one mag¬ 
pie used to lie down right on his back with 


Australian Animals and Our Pets 55 

his feet in the air and cry like a baby— 
pretending he had fallen down! 

One day Frank and some other boys 
went out in the bush to hunt opossums. 
There were ever so many around Sydney, 
and most boys had one or two in captiv¬ 
ity, although they were really protected 
by law. 

In the bough of a gum-tree on top of 
the cliffs not far from our house, Frank 
and his friends came across a mother ’pos¬ 
sum with four little babies on her back. 
They cuddled up close together and held 
on to her fur as tight as they could, while 
the mother ran from tree to tree and rock 
to rock with the boys behind her, until she 
was right on the edge of the precipice. 
She gave one terrified look at the children 
—and leaped over the cliff. One hundred 
and twenty feet below, Frank found her 
with all the babies dead except one. 

It was a very tiny thing, hardly bigger 
than your hand and much too young to 



56 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

live without its mother, but F rank 
brought it home, and Mother reared it. 
For weeks she fostered the tiny mite until 
it became as tame as a kitten. To keep it 
cosy, she used to roll it up and let it sleep 
in bed with her. She called it Flossie. 

Flossie was the cutest pet you ever saw. 
She went wherever she liked in the house, 
and during meals we used to let her walk 
about the table—when she was very small, 
of course. In the middle of the dining- 
table we always had a low bowl of flowers 
or bush leaves. In the spring, just about 
the time Flossie began to feel really at 
home with us, our table decorations were 
always the lovely-tinted gum tips. Flos¬ 
sie used to sit up on her little haunches 
and pick herself wee handfuls of young 
gum leaves. When she tired of that, she 
peeped into our plates and tried what we 
had. She never liked our food, though. 
The only thing on the table that she really 
enjoyed was Worcestershire sauce. Tak- 








Australian Animals and Our Pets 57 

ing the bottle deftly by the neck so that 
she could stand up on her teeny feet, she 
balanced herself while she licked every 
drop off the lip and sides. 

In a very short time Flossie grew up. 
She began to think of a nest and a family. 
Although she had never in her life seen 
another opossum, she started her home¬ 
making. All day long she tore up bits 
of paper, rolled them into long pads, 
curled her tail round them, and carried 
them to the lowest shelf of Mother’s book¬ 
case, where the nest was to be. It was a 
long time before we discovered what she 
was doing, going about like that with par¬ 
cels held high in the air with a loop of her 
long tail! 

One night she disappeared into the 
bush. Frank found she had not slept in 
her usual place on a rug at the foot of his 
bed. She was nowhere in the house at 
all. We were certain that the wild ’pos¬ 
sums would kill her if she went back to 


58 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

them. All day long we searched and 
called her, “ Flossie! Flossie!” She 
knew and had answered the name many 
times before, but this time she did not 
come back. 

We gave her up as lost. But one wet 
night the following winter Frank felt 
something cold and very soppy on his feet. 
It was Flossie come home again! She 
had not liked the bush, after all, and she 
had come back to the kind of bed she was 
used to. 

A man came to the door soon after we 
had gone to live near the beach. He was 
selling sea-birds, called terns. Their 
wings were clipped, and he said they 
would live quite contentedly on the lawn 
if we gave them plenty of fish to eat. 
Mother bought Frank four, and our 
neighbors, unable to bear the sight of the 
captives and knowing our weakness for 
pets, bought us four more! The garden 
looked like a miniature seaport when they 


Australian Animals and Our Pets 59 

all started to select sunny spots and preen 
their feathers. None of them tried to 
escape. 

The terns proved to be the most difficult 
pets we ever had. When the man who 
sold them to us said, “ All you need to 
do is give them plenty of fish to eat,” 
there was more of a catch in it than any 
of us suspected. Those eight birds could 
eat surprisingly. 

Early and late, wet or fine, Frank and I 
had to go fishing. With small canvas 
fishing-bags on our backs (and how they 
smelled!) and linen hats on our heads, or 
sou’westers if it was raining, we used to 
start for the rocks before breakfast. 

On our way down we usually met other 
fishermen looking for good spots to try 
their luck, and they always came to Frank 
for information. “ Where’s the groper 
biting to-day, Frank? ” they would ask. 
“ Try the end of the big rock at the 
point,” or “ They should be good this 


60 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

morning in the channel below our place,” 
he would reply. And he was never wrong! 

One morning we had not had much 
luck, and we stayed away so long that we 
forgot breakfast-time. Gracie came to 
the low garden wall and whistled our own 
call: three short notes and two long ones. 

“Breakfast! Daddy’ll be furious!” I 
exclaimed. That was one point which 
Daddy was severe about. We had to be 
on time for meals, and looking neat. 

“ Come on! We’ll have to go up the 
cliff,” Frank called, as he sprang into the 
small bushes that grew in the crevices of 
rock. In the prolific Australian soil, trees 
and flowers grow in profusion on every 
little inch they can find. 

The first hundred feet of our particular 
route was not so steep. We had a trail— 
of sorts—over the best footholds. The 
last ten or twenty feet at the very top 
were too horrible to remember without a 
shudder, now that I am older. There was 


Australian Animals and Our Pets 61 

hardly anything to hold on to except a 
small tree clinging to a narrow ledge, and 
right at the very top the only way to level 
ground was over a gap to a projecting 
spur above. The gap was not wide, only 
about a couple of feet, but below there 
was a sheer drop—to death. We once 
took Daddy home by this trail. He got 
up easily as far as this part. Then he 
took one look down, clung back against 
the cliff, and turned quite sick. He for¬ 
bade us ever to go that way again, and we 
very nearly obeyed him. 

After we had given the terns a few fish, 
we had to feed them one at a time, other¬ 
wise some would eat everything and 
others get nothing! Frank seemed very 
thoughtful as we watched the birds bask¬ 
ing in the sunshine. 

“ You know, I don’t think this place is 
very nice for the terns,” he said at last. 
“ It isn’t so awfully like a beach, is it? ” 
“No, there are no real rocks like those 



62 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

on the shore. Why don’t we make the 
laundry into a proper beach for them? ” 

It was a grand idea. Mother said we 
could do it as long as we kept the sea¬ 
water in a tin basin on the floor and did 
not go too far with anything. 

Then our real work started. All day 
long (Mother did not see us doing it) we 
carried sacks of sand up from the beach, 
we dragged boulders from the gully, and 
we carried bucketfuls of salt water from 
the sea. 

When Mother saw it, she was greatly 
surprised. As I mentioned before, the 
laundry was built under the verandah by 
itself. There were several stationary tubs 
under the window, and a very new-fash¬ 
ioned boiler on legs with a gas ring under¬ 
neath. There had been nothing else in 
there except a table and some clothes- 
baskets. But when Mother saw our terns’ 
“ beach,” there was an inch of sand all 
over the floor, rocks piled as realistically 


Australian Animals and Our Pets 63 

as possible, and many tins and other 
things full of fresh sea water. The terns 
were all perched about in the most com¬ 
fortable spots. They liked it all im¬ 
mensely. 

“ All we need now,” said Frank, “ is a 
chain and padlock to fasten the door so 
nobody can get in and the terns can’t get 
away.” 

Mother did not have the heart to make 
us take it all out. 

“I’m just warning you, though,” she 
said. “ When the laundress comes on 
Monday, this place must be completely 
cleaned out.” 

Before the following Monday another 
trouble cropped up. 

We went into the laundry one morning, 
and two of the terns were lying dead on 
the floor. Frank took them out and ex¬ 
amined them. 

“ Just what I thought,” he exclaimed. 
“ The naked (native, he meant) cats have 


64 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

been in. See the bite at the back of the 
neck where they sucked the blood out? ” 

It was most mysterious. In spite of 
padlocks—which, by the way, we forgot 
to undo before the laundress came, so that 
she could not get in to wash—the wild 
cats were finding a way in to kill the 
birds. 

Night after night they destroyed one, 
until there were only two left. Frank’s 
little face looked worn with anxiety. He 
sat up watching and waiting the greater 
part of so many nights that he managed 
to keep the last two for quite a time. But 
Mother would not let him wear himself 
down like that. 

At last one day when Frank and I 
went to see how they were getting along, 
we found the padlock broken off the door 
and the last of the terns dead. We were 
heartbroken, but Mother gave us enough 
money to buy ourselves a new puppy to 
make up for our loss. We never knew 



Australian Animals and Our Pets 65 

how the terns died, but I think the cats 
had a hole in the roof. 

We always had dogs, of course, and 
cats and parrots. But Sago was the best 
of them all. He grew up with us, but 
he was only a waif off the streets when we 
got him. His mother lived on cigarette 
butts, as far as any one could see, in a 
very low part of the town. That did not 
matter, though. Sago was a real dog! 
We thought him very handsome with his 
short black-and-tan coat and his friendly 
eyes. He died of old age, eventually. 

The dog we bought with the tern-com¬ 
pensation money was a very beautiful, 
heavily coated, old English sheep dog. 
When he grew up, he got a tick, which 
eventually killed him. Ticks are tiny 
insects which attach themselves to the 
body and inject poison. If the animals 
are treated properly, they can easily be 
cured, but we did not discover what was 
wrong with our dog in time. 


66 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

In Australia, and in any other country 
where there are herds of cattle or big 
flocks of sheep, dogs are very important. 
Without them, the stockmen could not 
work. 

Our most common cattle dog is called 
a “ kelpie.” This is something like a 
smooth-coated collie with a sharp nose 
and pointed ears. It is a special breed of 
dog particularly suited to the climate and 
conditions of the country. They are 
almost any color, from what is known as 
the “ blue kelpie ” to black and brown, or 
mixtures. 

Out in the wilder parts of the bush and 
on the great plains inland there are many 
strange animals. Most of them are never 
known outside Australia, such as kanga¬ 
roos and wallabies, which are smaller 
kangaroos, and the queer wingless birds 
called emus; the little creatures half rats 
and half like tiny kangaroos, named 
bandicoots; and the platypus, about the 



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Australian Animals and Our Pets 67 

size of a beaver, with a coat like an ani¬ 
mal, and webbed feet and a bill like a 
duck. There are also flying foxes, wom¬ 
bats, and tiny pale-colored bears which 
are called “ koalas,” or native bears. 
They furnished the model for the toy 
Teddy-bears. 

There are many unusual birds on the 
continent of Australia. The most peculiar 
is probably the lyre-bird with its beautiful 
tail that looks like the old-fashioned lyre. 
There is also the bower-bird, which builds 
a playground for itself almost like a gar¬ 
den, full of odd flower-petals, colored 
stones, or any other bright objects it can 
find. 

To tell much about the Australian birds 
and animals would really fill a whole book. 


CHAPTER V 


MIDDLE HARBOR 

We were going for a picnic. The 
hamper with all the equipment of white 
enamel cups, plates, and other necessary 
things was being overhauled on the 
kitchen table. Gracie was rushing all over 
the house, looking for the other half of 
Mother’s bathing-suit. Frank had to see 
that there were enough clean towels in a 
bundle for him to carry. He was to look 
after the bathing things. I was stationed 
at the kitchen window to watch the road. 
All we needed was the fruit to take with 
us. 

“ Here he comes now,” I called, as soon 
as I saw the old Chinaman coming down 
the trail with his fruit-baskets hanging 
from a pole across his shoulders. 

68 


Middle Harbor 


69 


He lowered the two huge baskets on the 
back doorstep and showed us what he had. 

4 4 Wantum pesimmon? ” he asked, un¬ 
covering his store of the soft red fruit. 
44 Welly ni’ neckte’lin,” he added, offer¬ 
ing Mother the flat basket full of peach- 
colored nectarines. 44 Mandalin? ” he in¬ 
quired, taking up a handful of small 
fragrant tangerines, which we call man¬ 
darins in Australia. 44 Glape? Olangee? 
Melon? ” 

Mother bought some of them all, and 
then looked at the vegetables. It would 
be three or four days before he would be 
calling again. 

44 Peas? Mallow? Cabbagee? ” 

44 1 want some chokos,” Mother told 
him, and he fished out all the smaller 
baskets that filled his bigger ones until he 
found the little round, or rather pearlike, 
green vegetables with spikes on them, 
called 44 chokos.” 

44 Now a cucumber and two pounds of 


70 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

tomatoes, and that will be all to-day, 
John,” Mother said to the Chinaman. 

“ Only gottum this clucumber, welly 
solly,” he apologized, as he offered Mother 
some round yellow ones instead of the 
usual long green kind. 

“ I like those better than the green,” 
said Mother, and after the Chinaman had 
weighed the tomatoes on his portable 
scales, we soon had the last packages in 
the picnic baskets. 

Mother, with her sunshade and the 
extra coats on her arm for the evening 
in case it got cold, went down the gully 
first, with Daddy to help her over the 
roughest bits. He carried the large 
hamper. Frank and I had the bathing- 
suits and the fishing-lines. Gracie carried 
an extra basket of food, and Sago, the 
little terrier, scampered all over the place 
with excitement. 

At the boat-shed on the beach Daddy 
chose a good-sized skiff and helped to 


Middle Hai'bor 


71 


push it down the slip to the water. At 
last we w^ere all in. Sago was in the 
stern, sitting perfectly still and straight, 
every bit of him delighted. 

“ You’d better give us some water,” 
Daddy called to the barefooted boatman. 
“ There may not be any where we are 
going.” 

The man gave us two huge basket- 
covered demijohns of fresh water, and w^e 
covered them up to keep the sun off. 

“ There’s a bit of sail on board if you 
happen to want it,” the man said, as 
Daddy fixed the oars in the rowlocks, and 
we set off. 

The water was so clear that we could 
see the schools of silver garfish darting 
about under the boat. Frank wanted to 
start fishing right away, but Daddy 
would not let him. 

Pulling gently and steadily, we passed 
the curved white sanded beach where we 
lived, rowed past the jutting headlands 


72 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

that divided one tiny beach from another 
on either side of the water; past the scat¬ 
tered solitary week-end cottages perched 
among the trees on the harbor banks; 
past the sheer bare cliffs in places; and 
past the swimming baths just at the nar¬ 
rowest part of the water. These swim¬ 
ming baths are simply a part of the har¬ 
bor screened off by wire netting to keep 
the sharks out. The net goes down to 
the bed of the harbor in the form of a 
large square, and above it all the way 
around there is a wide wooden platform 
with dressing cubicles facing the inside of 
the baths. It is perfectly private. Noth¬ 
ing can be seen from the outside except 
the walls. It is open to the sky, though, 
and just lovely for sun-bathing and div¬ 
ing. 

A little way past the baths, a narrow 
flat piece of land runs right out into the 
harbor to within a hundred feet or so of 
the opposite shore. The little space of 



Australian Dairy Herd 
Typical country scene in New South Wales. 



Sidney Heads 

Seen from Middle Head, N. S. W. 





Middle Harbor 


73 


water between is very deep. It is called 
the Spit, and there is a bridge across 
there now, but when we were small, there 
was only an old punt that chugged over 
on steel ropes every so often. 

Daddy had to rest on his oars when we 
reached this point, because the punt was 
on its journey across and the ropes were 
taut. At the shore it clanged and rattled 
and grated to a stop. The gates were 
opened, and all the carts, automobiles, 
bicycles, trucks, and picnic parties scram¬ 
bled off. 

After we had rowed over, we found 
ourselves in much calmer water. All 
kinds of boats were moored along the 
shores. There were sailing-boats, motor- 
boats, skiffs, large launches, and little old 
tin canoes. Lovely house-boats were 
sheltered among the trees in quiet bays, 
and dirty half-broken-up house-boats 
leaned on the sand. 

As we were passing through Pearl Bay 


74 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

with its colony of week-end cottages 
clinging here and there on the hills, we 
saw a friend of ours waving from the end 
of a house-boat moored near the rocks. 

“ Come aboard,” she called. 

We pulled in at the steps, and just as 
we were going to start climbing up, the 
wash from a big launch going by farther 
out swept the skiff out from the house¬ 
boat, and Sago, who had tried to be the 
first on board, fell into the water with a 
splash! 

It was not a very big house-boat, but 
it was very pretty. It was painted white 
and green, with white-and-green awnings 
and frilly white curtains in the windows. 
Frank and I went out to the end of the 
deck and put our lines in the water— 
Frank always had a little tin of bait in 
his trousers pocket, or tied to his lines. 
The yellowtail were disgustingly small, 
but they were biting well. 

“ Let’s cut up the yellowtail for bait,” 


Middle Harbor 75 

I suggested. “ This stuff is no good for 
a big fish.” 

We had been using long-time-dead 
shrimps and scraps of “ conjewoy,” a fish 
that grew like a plant in the shallow water 
along the rocks and was so tough that it 
took us a long time to hack off the bits for 
bait. I believe that it was a species of 
sea-anemone. 

Our luck was out as far as big fish 
were concerned, but before we set off 
again for the picnic ground, we saw our 
friend haul in a good flathead. She had 
caught it on a line which she always kept 
hanging baited from one end of the boat. 
Twice a day she pulled it in to see how 
it was getting along. 

A pretty stiff wind came up after we 
left the' house-boat, and Daddy suggested 
putting the sail in. But there was no 
mast. 

“ That doesn’t matter,” Gracie said. 
“ There is a hole in the middle of the seat. 


76 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

We can fasten the sail on the oar and use 
it for a mast.” 

It was great fun fixing it up. The hole 
was too big and the oar kept falling over, 
so Gracie said she would hold it. She put 
her legs and arms round it somehow. 
Daddy arranged the other oar like a 
boom. He knew all about sailing, and 
with Mother holding the rudder-lines and 
the wind filling the sail just strong 
enough to take us along, we scudded up 
the harbor beautifully. 

Hardly anybody lived up there. It 
was too far away. The trees threw 
shadows on the water. There were head¬ 
lands, islands, inlets, and bays. All was 
blue above the water, and there were 
limpid green depths below. 

It was like sailing into a forest, at last. 
Miles and miles of silent bush clothed the 
hills. Birds called. The sun shimmered. 
Sago fell asleep on the bathing-suits. 
Frank and I looked into the water and 


Middle Harbor 


77 


dabbled our hands and feet, while Gracie 
and Daddy saw to the sails. 

Grade’s long fair hair had fallen out of 
its ribbon, and the wind blew it wildly 
around her head. But she loved it, and 
could not stop laughing when the mast 
bent over or an extra strong puff nearly 
sent us all overboard. 

The water got shallower. The stream 
narrowed, and we took the sail down. 
Already I could see the big rock, with its 
shadow clear on a glassy pool, near the 
place where we were going to picnic. 
Daddy was pulling very gently on the 
oars. All of a sudden we came to a stop. 

“Struck a sandbank!” cried Daddy. 
Sago sat up with a start and looked over 
the side with the rest of us. No amount 
of pushing would shift the boat, though 
we had grounded lightly. 

“ Well, I suppose there is nothing for 
it but to get out. Put your suits on,” 
Mother said to Frank and me. Daddy 


78 When 1 Was a Girl in Australia 

had his on under his shirt and trousers, so 
he was soon ready for the water. 

It was not very deep, being only about 
up to Daddy’s waist. Gracie and Mother 
went down in the opposite end of the boat, 
and Daddy lifted it clear of the sand. 
Sago and Frank and I did not get back 
again. We went off to the picnic place. 
We were all swimming much the same 
stroke, and we were there as soon as the 
others, just the same. 

We all helped to pull the boat on to 
the shore and carry the baskets and things 
into the shade of a gum-tree. 

Soon we had a pile of dried sticks and 
twigs for the fire. Daddy found two 
about the same length, and cut them so 
that two forked ends would hold a rather 
heavy stick, like a bar, across the top. 
He hung the billy on this. A billy is a 
tin can with a handle over the top, not 
unlike a lard-container in America, and 
nobody ever goes anywhere in the Aus- 


Middle Harbor 


79 


tralian bush without a billy to boil water 
and make tea in. 

A small twig placed on the open top 
of the billy keeps the water from tasting 
of smoke. While it was boiling, Mother 
spread the lunch on a flat stone, and we 
all sat around on the dry grass. 

While we were eating, a turquoise-blue 
kingfisher darted into the stream and 
caught a tiny fish. Somewhere out of 
sight in the branches overhead a kooka¬ 
burra suddenly started to laugh. It 
sounded just like a man with a harsh 
voice! 

After lunch we washed the cups and 
plates in the water and put them away. 
Mother and Gracie made a dressing-room 
with the towels and some bushes. As 
soon as we were all in our bathing-suits, 
we climbed on the big smooth rock, which 
was one of our favorite spots on the 
harbor. 

It was very warm, and we jumped in 


80 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

and out of the water. We lay so quietly 
on the rock in the sun that a blue-tongued 
lizard about a foot long slid out and 
closed his eyes quite near us. But Sago 
moved, and the lizard was so surprised to 
see us that he shot his long tongue out 
furiously, like a thin blue flame, and dis¬ 
appeared into the bush again. 

Towards evening we started out for 
home. Daddy had a long row ahead of 
him, and we did not want to be too late 
getting back. 

On our way through the hills the sun 
set. The water shimmered with red and 
gold. All the tips of the banks and the 
shadows along the shore were dark, and 
looking back, I could see the mist-veils 
drifting down on the jutting points, with 
Sugar Loaf Point the biggest and darkest 
of them all. 

As soon as the sun was gone, the air 
was cool enough for our coats. We had 
thought Mother was ridiculous when she 


Middle Harbor 


81 


insisted on bringing them in the morning, 
but we were glad to have them now, 
although it was not really cold. 

Lights began to show here and there 
through the gum-trees. Sago crept on 
my knee, and Frank tried to take him 
from me. 

“ Leave him alone, or I’ll push you 
overboard,” I told him. 

“ You will? Just try it—that’s all.” 
We should have had an argument and 
probably have hurt poor Sago, but Daddy 
made Frank go down to the other end 
of the boat and sit with Mother. I would 
rather have been in his place and let him 
have the dog! 

Softly the water splashed away from 
the oars. Long ribbons of pale phos¬ 
phorus broke away from the bows, and 
Gracie picked the strings of her mandolin 
and hummed to herself. 

“ Play something—go on, won’t you? ” 
I begged. 


82 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

“ Go to sleep, my little picaninny . . .” 

she sang. Her voice was high and clear. 
It echoed over the water, and seemed in 
the darkness and the silence like the only 
sound in the world. But soon we were all 
singing with her: 

“ Mammy’s going to smack you if you don’t . . . 
Mammy’s little Alabama coon.” 


CHAPTER VI 


A HOLIDAY IN THE BUSH 

Frank and I went for a holiday in the 
country to a place called Penrose, not far 
from Bundanoon, and not far from the 
well-known town of Goulbum in New 
South Wales. 

The wattle was in bloom, and the bush 
was ablaze with the soft yellow flowers, 
which grew closely packed on the rather 
small trees, like mimosa or acacia. We 
could smell them the minute we stepped 
off the train and down from the wooden 
platform to the rough track, where the 
aunt with whom we were to stay was wait¬ 
ing for us. 

Quite near the railway station there 
was a little general store. It was the 
post-office as well, and we went inside to 

83 


84 When 1 Was a Girl in Australia 

send a telegram to Mother so that she 
would know we had arrived safely. 

The girl in the store wore spectacles. 
She was not very old, but she was the 
most inquisitive person I have ever seen. 
As soon as Auntie took us inside, she 
peered at us carefully. 

“ So these are the children! ” she said. 
“ How old are you? ” 

“ I’m seven, and Frank is eight,” I 
answered. “ And will you send the tele¬ 
gram to Mother right away, please? ” 

“ All in good time. All in good time.” 
Very slowly she read the address, the 
name, and the message. She counted the 
words out loud and thought about them 
for a while. 

“ Let me see now,” she said to Auntie. 
“ This will be your younger sister, I sup¬ 
pose. The one that married the archi¬ 
tect. . . .” 

It was quite a long time before Auntie 
managed to get out of the store, and as 


85 


A Holiday in the Bush 

we walked along through the bush, she 
said, ‘‘It is much better fun for Miss 
Smalley when we send post-cards or tele¬ 
grams. She worries so much about let¬ 
ters, which she can’t see! Whenever I get 
letters or send them, I tell her whom they 
are from and whom I am writing to—just 
to give her something to talk about.” 

We walked for a long, long time. We 
did not pass a house of any kind except 
the few that were close to the railway. 
We did not meet any people on the road, 
even. 

At last we opened a big five-barred 
gate that crossed the middle of the track, 
and in the distance we could see a house, 
built off the ground, with ever so many 
French windows opening on a long veran¬ 
dah. 

“ Oh, Auntie, is that the house? ” I 
cried. It was the first station, or ranch, 
as they call them in America, that I had 


ever seen. 


86 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

“No, darling, that is the homestead,’’ 
Auntie replied. “ Uncle Bert is the man¬ 
ager, you know. He has a house of his 
own. We shall be able to see it in a 
minute.” 

A young man in riding-breeches, with 
an old sheep dog at his heels, passed us. 

“ Good night,” he said cheerfully. 
“ Been a fair cow to-day! ” and he grinned 
under the brim of his slouch hat. “ Fair 
cow ” is an Australian expression which 
means “ awful.” In America a man 
would have said, “ It has been an awfully 
hot day.” 

“ Who was that? ” asked Frank. 

“ Just one of the jackeroos. There are 
three or four of them at the homestead.” 

A jackeroo is a person who is learning 
to be a farmer. They are usually young 
men from good families, and although 
they work and help on the station, they 
live with the people at the homestead and 
not in the quarters with the hired hands. 


87 


A Holiday in the Bush 

“ Now you can see our house,” Auntie 
said, pointing to a very plain wooden 
structure at least four feet off the earth. 
I was a bit disappointed. It was not 
nearly so pretty nor so big as the home¬ 
stead. 

“ It doesn’t look very nice at present,” 
Auntie went on. “ It is so new, but when 
all the flowers come up in the garden and 
the creepers begin to climb over the 
verandahs, it will be a dear little home.” 

Inside, the rooms were large and airy. 
There were pretty rugs and carpets on 
the floors, and all the windows looked 
right out into the smoky-blue glades of 
the Eucalyptus forests. We had seen the 
kookaburras before in Sydney, but here 
they were as common as magpies or willy- 
wagtails were at home. 

To us, however, the most interesting 
feature of the house was the bathroom 

and laundry, combined! We could hardly 

/ 

wait till bedtime to have a hot bath. 


88 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

As soon as Uncle Bert came in, with 
his hearty voice ringing to the roof, 
Auntie asked him if he would light the 
fire under the copper, because we had set 
our hearts on having a bath at once. 

After he had thrown us, in turn, so high 
that we nearly hit the ceiling, he began 
to break up the sticks and stuff the 
kindling in the little place where the fire 
went, under the square brick structure 
with its boiler, like a deep well, in the 
middle. It was this boiler made of copper 
that gave the whole thing its name. It 

i 

stood, to our great delight, in the corner 
of the bathroom. At home, off the beaten 
track though we were, we had a gas bath- 
heater, and the copper was in the laundry. 

A little country girl, called Meg, 
helped Auntie to set the meal out in the 
dining-room while the water was getting 
hot. And what a meal it was! Uncle 
Bert was quite astonished and called us 
chickens and canaries and I don’t know 


A Holiday in the Bush 89 

what else, because Frank and I could not 
each eat two eggs after our lamb chops 
and mashed potatoes, with boiled onions 
in sauce. 

I had never seen so much food pre¬ 
pared for so few people, though Uncle 
Bert certainly made up for several! 

“ We won’t have the bath just yet,” he 
said, after we had eaten all the rice pud¬ 
ding and heaps of whipped cream we 
could possibly manage. “ We’ll have a 
little music instead. I’m going to teach 
you both to dance before you go home. 
Come on, now, Nancy,” he said to Auntie. 
“ Show them how the polka goes.” 

Sitting on a low chintz divan with his 
long legs stretched out before him, he 
played his banjo with all his might, hum¬ 
ming and singing and beating time to the 
lively tunes with his enormous boots. 

“ Bath time,” Auntie announced after 
a little while, and, although we were en¬ 
joying ourselves so much, I really was 


90 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

feeling tired. It had been a journey of 
almost four hours in the train from 
Sydney. 

With a large dipper, Uncle Bert ladled 
the water out of the copper and poured 
it into the bathtub. Frank and I walked 
backwards and forwards across the room 
with every dipperful! 

We slept in twin beds in the same room, 
and were thrilled over the candle on the 
table between us. Frank would not get 
into bed until he had collected all the soft 
wax and rolled it into balls like marbles. 
He had just begun to roll a long strip 
so that he could hold it in his hands and 
burn it, when Auntie came in and made 
us settle down. 

“ To-morrow you shall see the pigs,” 
she said, as she closed the door. 

It was the first time I had ever been so 
far away from home. As I lay in bed, it 
seemed terribly still. I had lived near the 
sea for so long that I missed the sound of 


91 


A Holiday in the Bush 

the waves on the cliffs. Away in the dis¬ 
tance through the silence of the bush, I 
heard the whistle of a train. The shu-shu- 
shu, shu-shu-shu, was perfectly clear. It 
was going back to Sydney, perhaps. I 
suddenly wanted to go back, too. I felt 
frightfully alone. Everything seemed so 
strange and unfamiliar. 

I sat up in bed. In the dim light I 
could see Frank curled up asleep. 

“ Let me get into your bed, Frank,” I 
whispered, pulling the covers away from 
his side. 

“ What’s the matter with you? Get 
out . . . oh, well . . .” and he 

let me get in with him. 

A butcher-bird woke me in the morn¬ 
ing, calling loudly in a gum-tree bough 
that nearly touched the window. 

In the kitchen Meg was preparing 
breakfast. There were such quantities of 
porridge and eggs and bacon and toast 
that I should never have known how it 


92 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

could all be eaten if I had not seen Uncle 
Bert at dinner the evening before. 

Meg put all the scraps out of the win¬ 
dow—egg-shells, fruit peelings, crusts, 
tea-leaves, and everything. 

“ Do you think you should do that, 
Meg? ” I said reprovingly. “ It will 
bring the flies, won’t it? ” 

“ Oh, no, none of it will be there long 
enough for that,” she answered. “ The 
dogs will eat it all. And what they won’t 
eat will dry up in the sun, and I’ll put 
some earth over it later on. That’ll be a 
bosker flower-bed when I’m finished,” she 
laughed. “ Bosker,” or “ bonzer,” means 
“ good,” or, in American, “ dandy.” 

I looked out of the window to see what 
the place looked like after so much gar¬ 
bage had been thrown out. There was 
hardly anything to be seen on the red- 
soil flower-bed. Three or four miserable 
mongrels were busily nosing about in the 
last batch of tea-leaves. 


93 


A Holiday in the Bush 

* 

“Are those Uncle Bert’s dogs?” I 
asked. 

“ Those are nobody’s dogs in particular. 
They just live here and about the home¬ 
stead,” Meg told me, as she hurried off 
with the tray to the dining-room. 

“ Who’s ready to see my prize pigs? ” 
boomed Uncle Bert, the minute he came 
through the door. He pinched our ears 
and sat down. “ Directly after breakfast 
you two just come with me, and I’ll show 
you the biggest pigs you ever saw.” 

And he did. They were in a row of 
sties quite a long way from the house, and 
they seemed to be the great interest of his 
life, though the station went in for wheat 
and sheep chiefly. 

“ I get prizes at the Sydney Show with 
these fellows,” he announced, looking at 
us proudly out of the corner of his twin¬ 
kling blue eyes. “ They’re Blue Ribbon 
pigs, they are!” And I did not know 
what he meant, but as I could not see any 


94 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

blue ribbons on the huge, grunting 
porkers, I thought it best to say nothing 
more. I never liked pigs much, anyway. 

I liked the little fat lambs better, but 
there were only one or two at the station 
because the flocks were out in the pad- 
docks, miles and miles away. 

We went into the shearing-sheds. 

“ When it’s time to shear the sheep,” 
Uncle Bert said, “ there are a lot of men 
in here, all clipping the wool as fast as 
they can. And when they’ve sheared our 
sheep, the shearing-contractor takes them 
away to the next place, till all the sheep 
in the country are perfectly bare. Then 
the wool is put in bales and taken down 
to Sydney to be classed, graded, and sold 
in the Wool Exchange. Every country 
in the world sends men there to buy our 
wool, so that little boys and girls in Ger¬ 
many and France and Japan and every¬ 
where else can have warm clothes to 


wear. 



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A Holiday in the Bush 95 

“ What is that noise in the trees ? 99 
asked Frank, looking into the Eucalyptus 
as he came out of the wool-shed and 
crossed the clearing into the bush. 

“ Cockatoos/’ answered Uncle Bert, 
and at that moment a flock of snow-white 
sulphur-crested cockatoos soared into the 
sky, screeching till we were almost deaf¬ 
ened. It made me think of the zoo in 
Sydney. 

Back at the house we found that Auntie 
had a visitor, her nearest neighbor out¬ 
side the homestead. 

“ Children, this is Mrs. Moonbie,” 
Auntie said. “She lives three miles away 
through the hush. Those were her little 
girls you saw going past the house this 
morning.” We greeted a woman whose 
face was very red and whose hand trem¬ 
bled constantly as we shook it. 

“ She looks like the 4 char ’ we used to 
have,” I whispered to Frank, as we 
turned our backs and watched a wagtail 


96 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

dipping his black and white tail from side 
to side on the lawn. 

“ No, Mrs. Moonbie, I’m afraid I 
couldn’t go to Bundanoon with you to¬ 
day,” I heard Auntie saying, as the 
woman drove away in the high buggy 
which had been waiting for her in the 
driveway. 

“ That’s a queer one, Nancy,” Uncle 
Bert said laughingly to Auntie. “ I could 
just see you arriving in Bundanoon, 
perched up in the buggy with Mrs. 
Moonbie.” 

“ It’s a lonely life for poor people in 
the country,” Auntie sighed, “ and we 
should all be kind to one another if we 
can, but sometimes Mrs. Moonbie is 
almost too much for me!” 

At the end of a week Frank and I were 
in the train once more, going home to 
Sydney through the rolling downs, the big 
trees of the bush, and the smaller trees 
of the scrub, over the winding little 


97 


A Holiday in the Bush 

creeks, and past the sometimes solitary 
trees that dotted the pasture lands, where 
herds were grazing and sheep were pad¬ 
ding through the grass. 


CHAPTER VII 


AN OLD WOMAN AND SYDNEY TOWN 

Our friend Mrs. Watson, who lived on 
a house-boat in Pearl Bay, did not have 
a grey hair on her head. Although she 
was old, her footstep was as firm as 
Grade’s. She talked about everything, 
and all the time! 

One day when we were all having tea 
on her house-boat, Mother happened to 
ask how big the room was that we were 
sitting in. Mrs. Watson picked up the 
hem of her dress and began to measure 
the walls with it. Yard after yard she 
counted. There was enough material in 
her skirt to measure the whole room! 

Not long afterwards Mrs. Watson 
went to England for a holiday. Mother 
made Gracie and me go down to the 

98 


dn Old Woman and Sydney Town 99 

house-boat to help the old lady get ready 
for the voyage. I was not able to do 
much, because I could not sew very well, 
but I had to go, anyway. Mrs. Watson 
called us her “ sunbeams.” 

One of the things that Grade put in 
order for the trip was a flared black coat. 
It was tight at the waist, and covered with 
black braid sewn on in patterns. At 
least, some of it was sewn on. Poor 
Gracie had to mend all the pieces that had 
come away. She and I sat together on 
the old lady’s bed, doing what we could 
with the coat. Mrs. Watson was very 
much excited over her preparations, and 
she kept foraging into trunks and drawers 
after clothes which she might be able to 
take with her, trying them on, and hold¬ 
ing bows of ribbon and bits of lace here 
and there to see how we thought they 
looked. 

She tried on a hat that looked like a 
man’s Panama. Her beautiful brown 


100 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

hair was coiled in a big “ bun ” at the back 
of her head, so that the hat was perched 
well forward over her face. Over this she 
tied a black silk scarf. 

“ That will keep it on if it’s windy on 
board ship,” she said, turning for us to 
see the effect. “ It will look rather nice, 
I think, don’t you? ” 

Gracie and I could hardly stop laugh¬ 
ing. 

“ It looks a real mess,” Gracie giggled 
in my ear, but Mrs. Watson stowed it in 
her cabin trunk, quite content with it. 

She had some shopping to do over in 
the city, so she said she would take Gracie 
and me to town with her. 

She bustled all over the boat, getting 
ready. At last she stepped into the skiff 
where Gracie and I were waiting to row 
her ashore. She had a ruffled lace cape 
on, and a satchel in her hand. 

At the boat-shed near the Spit, where 
we had to land and get a street-car to take 


An Old Woman and Sydney Town 101 

us to the ferry, a tall, powerfully-built 
man, with a very strong red face under 
his tilted hat, came down to the edge of 
the slip to help us out. It was Harry 
Pearce, the father of Bob Pearce who 
later became the world’s champion sculler. 
The great Australian oarsman learned to 
row in the waters of Middle Harbor. 

“ I’ll see that the boat’s all right,” said 
Harry Pearce. “ You’ll find some one 
here to look after you when you come 
back to-night.” 

Luckily there was a tram, or street-car, 
as it is called in America, waiting at the 
stop. There were three or four little boys 
trying to sell wild flowers to the passen¬ 
gers as the punt came in. 

“ Want to buy some Christmas bells? ” 
said one, offering a handful of flowers like 
clusters of red bells, yellow-lipped and 
scentless. Another had bunches of flan¬ 
nel-flowers. They looked like white 
daisies made of heavy flannel, with 


102 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

greenish centers. Few people stopped to 
buy them. The hurry to get the tram was 
too great. 

Inside, the conductor came to the open¬ 
ing of the car and called, “ Fares, please.” 

Mrs. Watson took her large lace-over¬ 
wire hat off her head. Inside the crown 
she had her purse and her gloves. She 
paid the fares and put the hat on again. 

Slowly the street-car wound its way up 
the steep grade of the Spit Road and 
through the long streets of the suburb to 
the ferry at the head of Mosman Bay. 

There we had to wait under the roof of 
the ferry-building for a few minutes. 
Wandering along the stone coping of the 
wharf, I saw a large iron ring cemented 
into the time-worn rock. 

“ What is that for, Mrs. Watson? ” I 
was forever asking the old lady questions 
because she was a keen student of almost 
everything under the sun. Her knowl¬ 
edge of history was remarkable. 




Mosman Bay, Cremorne, and Sidney Harbor 


The Gap 

South Head, showing Middle Head, N. S. W. 









An Old Woman and Sydney Town 103 

“ That’s the ring that Captain Archi¬ 
bald Mosman used when he tied his whal¬ 
ing ships to the wharf. About a hundred 
years ago Sydney was a great whaling 
station, and Mosman Bay the favorite 
anchorage. That old stone building over 
there . . .” 

“ Is the Boy Scouts’ drill hall,” I inter¬ 
rupted. 

“ It is now, my dear, but in the olden 
days it was Captain Mosman’s head¬ 
quarters.” 

“ I suppose Mosman was called after 
him. . . .” 

Just at that moment the double-decked 
ferry drew near the wharf. The rails 
were lined with men and boys poised 
ready to jump the minute the boat was 
near enough to land. No one who is a 
good jumper ever waits for the gangways 
in Sydney! The people in that town have 
one quality in common with the Ameri¬ 
cans; they are always eager, always in a 


104 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

hurry to get somewhere. There is no 
place for listless feet on Sydney pave¬ 
ments. 

We chose seats on the outside of the 
upper deck, and watched the shores of 
Mosman Bay go by. All its slopes were 
densely packed with houses and blocks of 
flats, and all the foreshores were lined 
with anchored pleasure boats. Although 
we lived in Mosman, we were a long way 
from this part of the suburb. Mosman 
Bay opens out into the harbor fairway. 
Our little beach was right on the other 
side of Middle Head, a half-moon of sand 
washed by the waters of Middle Harbor. 

As the ferry rounded Cremorne Point, 
we saw the stone tower and low buildings 
of Fort Dennison on a small island right 
in the middle of the water. 

“ Do you really think there used to be 
convicts in the dungeons on Pinchgut ? ” 
I asked Mrs. Watson, using the older 
name for the Fort. 


An Old Woman and Sydney Town 105 

“ Yes, there certainly were. But it was 
a long time ago,” she said. 

“ I don’t believe it. Sydney was never 
a convict place. The convicts were at 
Botany Bay. Frank told me they were,” 
I asserted. 

“ That’s where you are wrong, my 
dear,” answered Mrs. Watson, and I 
knew she was going to tell me some his¬ 
tory. “ No convicts ever went to Botany 
Bay, at all. They were sent to Sydney. 
Right where the city is now there used to 
be a prison, or, as they call it, a penal 
colony.” 

I felt hot with indignation, although I 
did not really know what it was that she 
meant. I imagined the kind of prison 
where they sent burglars and murderers 
and all kinds of wicked people, but Mrs. 
Watson went on with her history. 

“ A long time ago the English govern¬ 
ment sent Commodore Phillip with a 
shipload of convicts to Botany Bay. That 


106 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

was the place where Captain Cook had 
landed and hoisted the English flag, so it 
was the only part of Australia known to 
England. Naturally, that was where 
they decided to send the prisoners—most 
of them were sent away to the settlement 
for very little crimes, like stealing fancy 
birds called partridge and grouse from 
noblemen’s estates. But when Commo¬ 
dore, or, as he later became, Governor, 
Phillip landed, he didn’t think Botany 
Bay was a good place for the colony, so 
he sailed on to Port Jackson, which is the 
real name for Sydney Harbor, and he 
started the prison settlement here. That’s 
why there are so many roads and stone 
houses round Sydney. The convicts made 
them.” 

“ What did they put them on Pinchgut 
for, though, if they weren’t really bad 
men? ” I persisted. 

“ Only the very disobedient prisoners 
were kept in the Fort. If they were 


An Old Woman and Sydney Town 107 

caught trying to run away on the main¬ 
land, the warders shut them up on the 
island where they were safe. If they tried 
to escape from Pinchgut, there were 
sharks to get them in the water.” 

It looked very pretty, and I did not 
like to think that anything so cruel had 
ever happened in such a sunny place. 

As the ferry chugged along to the quay, 
we passed the ships of every nation riding 
at anchor in the bays and coves, or steam¬ 
ing out to the Heads. There were busy 
little tugboats, battleships at Garden 
Island for repairs, freighters loading, 
liners veering to their wharves in Darling 
Harbor or Woolloomooloo Bay, and sail¬ 
ing vessels with masts dipping as the 
water heaved beneath them. 

All the romance of the ocean, all the 
adventure of the South Seas, all the mys¬ 
tery of the world’s Eastern ports is pass¬ 
ing up and down the fairway of Sydney’s 
busy harbor. Freights of copra and sugar 


108 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

and wool, of wheat and wood and silks, 
are riding there. There are turbans on 
the lascar crew of the P. and O. liners. 
There are Chinese faces at the port-holes 
of rusty tramps. There are fantastic 
flags waving at the sterns of brigantines, 
and there are Russian characters scrawled 
on the bows of high-decked ships of trade. 

There was a patter of Japanese sandals 
and the murmur of queer voices as we 
passed a passenger steamer from Nippon. 
I waved my hand from the ferry deck, 
and yelled, “ Hello there, Chinee.” Mrs. 
Watson was shocked. “ The very idea, 
child. Don’t you know that’s not a bit 
ladylike? ” It was useless to tell her that 
Frank and I always said “ Hello ” to 
sailors looking over ship’s railings. 

At last we reached Circular Quay. 
Mrs. Watson held me firmly by the hand. 
She seemed to guess that I wanted to 
jump off the ferry as the men were doing. 

Up the grade we scurried. Everybody 


An Old Woman and Sydney Town 109 

scurries to get through the turnstiles on 
Circular Quay. It always seems to be 
a rush hour there, and Mrs. Watson, 
knowing that she would need both her 
hands to get her money for fares, made 
Gracie hold on to me in the crowd. 

On the street-car we went up George 
Street, one of the oldest streets in the 
town. It is not very wide, but just as 
busy as any street in an ordinary Ameri¬ 
can city. At Martin Place, where the 
colonnaded Post-Office is, we got off the 
street-car to have a look at the lovely 
flower-stalls. They were a mass of color. 
Almost every flower you could imagine 
can be bought in Martin Place at the 
right season. That is, all except the lilac, 
which does not grow well in Australia. 
Bulbs of most varieties are also less com¬ 
mon than other flowers. 

The freesias are marvellous in Sydney. 
They will grow, even if only a few stray 
bulbs have been thrown into the bush with 


110 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

the garden rubbish, but daffodils have to 
come to Sydney from the cooler climate 
of Melbourne or the vicinity of the Blue 
Mountains. 

In and out of the shops we trailed with 
Mrs. Watson. She bought herself cotton 
stockings and cotton gloves and white 
nightgowns with high necks. 

“ If I just can get myself a pair of 
black rubber-soled shoes now, I think I 
shall have all I need, and we’ll have some¬ 
thing to eat.” 

So we went to all the big shops to see 
if we could find what she wanted. And 
there are some very big shops in Sydney. 
Few emporiums in any country cover 
more ground than Anthony Hordern’s, 
where we finally bought Mrs. Watson’s 
shoes. From there we went to another of 
the popular stores, called Farmer’s. 

On the roof of Farmer’s, among the 
grottoes and under the w T ide-striped um¬ 
brellas, Mrs. Watson treated Gracie and 


An Old Woman and Sydney Town 111 

me to a lovely tea. We had lemonade 
and ice-cream to our hearts’ content. 
Mrs. Watson let me wander about, and I 
watched the goldfish in the pools under 
the roof-garden fountains. 

But we were very tired. It was getting 
dark as we boarded the ferry for home 
again. Soon the harbor shores were 
sprinkled with lights. Lights appeared 
on the mastheads of the ships. Lights 
like tiny golden stars glistened over the 
waves from the ferry-windows, and a 
blaze of light greeted our return to the 
wharf at Mosman Bay. 

When we reached our stop on the 
street-car line, we said good-bye to Mrs. 
Watson and thanked her for her kindness 
to us that day. Both Gracie and I had 
small souvenir packages which she had 
bought us. Mine was candy, because I 
wanted to share it with Frank. 

“ If there is nobody to meet us,” Gracie 
said to the old lady, “ you don’t need to 


112 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

worry about our being in the dark. We 
will get our lamp on the way down the 
hill. We are used to it. I hope Harry 
Pearce is at the boat-shed to row you 
back to the house-boat.” 

Calling a last “ Good night ” as the 
tram went off again to the Spit, Gracie 
and I went down the red clay hill that led 
to our house. 

When we came to the last house on the 
paved section of the road, we leaned over 
a broken paling in the garden fence and 
found the hurricane-lamp. We always 
kept it hidden there to light us along the 
dark trails and the winding track we had 
to follow before we saw the beaten copper 
lantern with its little light gleaming 
before the green rafters of our own white 
bungalow-home. Mother was waiting for 
us with a tiny sprig of scarlet geranium 
in her black curls. Nobody else in the 
world could wear that but my mother! 


CHAPTER VIII 


OLD SYDNEY 

One evening we were all sitting in the 
garden under the flame-trees with our 
Uncle Don, and, as usual, he was talking 
about Australia. Uncle Don was the 
most patriotic man in the country, I am 
almost sure, and nobody repeated the 
national slogan as often as he did. “ Ad¬ 
vance, Australia ” meant something im¬ 
portant to him. Nobody knew Australian 
history as he did, either. The notion that 
other people were indifferent to our 
country’s past seemed very dreadful in¬ 
deed to Uncle Don. 

“ Do you mean to say that you have 
never shown these children the historical 
spots? ” he asked Mother. His voice was 
utterly astonished, and when she admitted 

113 


114 When 1 Was a Girl in Australia 

that Frank and I had never seen the old 
quarters of Sydney, he decided then and 
there that we should visit the city with 
him the following day. 

We met him on the Mosman ferry 
wharf and went on board with him. 

He began his talk at once. “ Helping 
our education,” he called it. 

“ You two don’t seem to realize,” he 
said, “ that Australia was once ‘ The 
Promised Land ’ to thousands of Eng¬ 
lishmen who crossed the ocean to make 
their fortunes on the sheep stations.” • 

“ I suppose that was in the early times 
when Australia was known as New Hol¬ 
land? ” I ventured. 

“ Oh, no, not so far back as that. 
When Governor Phillip came with the 
first ship of exiles to Botany Bay, the 
country was called New Holland, and 
Tasmania, England’s other settlement in 
these parts, was called Van Dieman’s 
Land after the Dutchman who first dis- 


115 


Old Sydney 

covered it. I was referring to a later 
period than that, to the time when John 
MacArthur’s famous wool was sold in 
London for the first time.” 

“ I learned about that at school,” Frank 
announced. “ It was put up for sale in 
a little coffee-house, wasn’t it? ” 

“Yes, at a tiny place in Change Alley, 
where it was the fashion to transact busi¬ 
ness in 1825 when the first shipment of 
Australian wool arrived in London. 
Nothing ever created so much excitement. 
Throughout England the wonderful 
quality of the merino wool was discussed, 
and the price it had brought made every¬ 
body turn his eyes towards the new coun¬ 
try. Rich men, poor men, beggar men, 
students, soldiers, and noblemen, all set 
sail for Australia, or wanted to.” 

While we listened to Uncle Don, we 
looked across the harbor. The ferry-boat 
had just rounded the end of Mosman 
Bay, and was slipping along towards 


116 When 1 Was a Girl in Australia 

Fort Dennison on its little isle. Frank 
and I were watching the polar bears walk¬ 
ing along the rocks below Taronga Zoo¬ 
logical Park, a little farther along the 
harbor shore. All the animals are in the 
open at Taronga Park. There are no 
real cages, except for the snakes and 
birds. But the bears were the only ani¬ 
mals we could see from the ferry. They 
seemed to be at large altogether, but in 
reality there were barriers to mark their 
enclosure and keep them from getting 
away, even though they could climb along 
the foreshore and swim in a special sec¬ 
tion of the water. 

Uncle Don’s voice went on with the 
story: “After the land had been taken 
up along the coast, it began to look like 
a pretty tough proposition for the sheep- 
breeders. You see, none of the country 
was explored at that time. So England 
sent trained men to the colony to make 
maps and prepare the way for settlers. 



»• 1 


r 


jm. #jpf * 


Kangaroos at Toronga Zoological Park 










117 


Old Sydney 

Just one hundred years ago, in 1831 , Cap¬ 
tain Charles Sturt explored the Murray 
and the Murrumbidgee Rivers. Another 
man named Major Thomas Mitchell—he 
was an old soldier—went out into the 
northwest country. He was one of the 
bravest men Australia ever knew. He 
fought savage aboriginal tribes; he en¬ 
dured terrible hardships, including intense 
heat; we can hardly understand what he 
went through when we see the country 
now. Anyway, he made his way down to 
what is the State of Victoria to-day, and 
so many people travelled over the cart- 
ruts he had made through the bush that 
it became known as ‘ the Major’s Line.’ ” 

The ferry was turning into Circular 
Quay, the spot from which the progress 
of Australia had radiated, the tiny sickle¬ 
shaped bay where Captain Phillip had 
landed the first settlers when he named it 
Sydney Cove. 

“ Well, it was a little stream of water 


118 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

running under the gum-trees that brought 
the first white men to Sydney,” com¬ 
mented Uncle Don. 

“ A stream of water? ” I exclaimed. 
“ There is no stream of water running 
through Sydney.” 

“ It is still there, but you can’t see it 
now because the town has been built over 
the top of it. When Governor Phillip 
sailed through Sydney Heads, he was 
looking for fresh water. He couldn’t land 
his passengers at Botany Bay because 
there was no drinking water, so he trav¬ 
elled down the coast till he came to this 
little bay. Here he saw the old Tank 
Stream, as it came to be called, flowing 
cool and fresh beneath the trees. He 
founded Sydney for that reason. Later 
on, when the town grew, the water was 
collected into a tank and sold from water 
carts to the people for two cents a pail.” 

The ferry bumped into the piles and 
grated gently along the wharf. Catching 


119 


Old Sydney 

Frank and me by the hands, Uncle Don 
ran up the gangway, and we found our¬ 
selves walking along the water-front of 
Circular Quay towards the oldest part of 
Sydney, the Rocks. 

The southern abutment of the new 
bridge across the harbor rests on the 
crown of the Rocks. The narrow, tor¬ 
tuous streets and the dark winding alley- 
ways of the olden days are gone now, but 
the wide causeway of the bridge runs 
right up into Wynyard Square, which was 
once the barracks of British soldiers. 
They drilled on the ground where the 
traffic of modern Sydney will soon be 
surging over the steel and concrete of the 
largest single-span bridge in the world. 

«r 

“ It’s quite easy to imagine the people 
who gathered around the old Tank 
Stream looking over here and speaking 
of it as 4 the Rocks,’ ” remarked Uncle 
Don, as we stood beside him and stared 
back at the line of wharves we had left. 


120 When 1 Was a Girl in Australia 

“ There’s not much left of the old place 
now, but k still, it’s the most historic bit of 
the town.” 

We walked through the stone walls of 
the Argyle Cut, one of the few landmarks 
which have escaped destruction so far. 

“The first fort in the country,” Uncle 
Don went on, “ was built on the Rocks, 
and so was the first gaol. At one time 
this spot was known as Gallows Hill. It 
seems impossible to us in these times, but 
in other days it was the custom to hang 
criminals in public. They were hanged on 
this hill. That is how it got its name.” 

No part of Sydney has had such a 
varied history as this small section just 
above the spot where the first governor 
landed. It has been the lowest quarter of 
the city, thronged with outlaws and thugs, 
who lived in evil houses and ended their 
days in prison. It has also been the most 
aristocratic quarter of the whole town, the 
home of the wealthy and the famous. 


121 


Old Sydney 

Certainly few corners of the colony can 
claim to have seen so many changes in the 
last hundred years. 

Uncle Don kept pausing to look at odd 
old houses and quaint ends of streets, 
which were sometimes sandwiched in be¬ 
tween the newer thoroughfares. 44 Over 
there on Flagstaff Hill the cows used to 
wander to their pastures.” He pointed 
out the place, and cows were the last thing 
in the world you would find there now! 

44 At the corners of this building there 
used to be soldiers on guard,” he said. I 
could hardly believe it was the Fort 
Street High School he was talking about, 
and when I told him so, he answered, 
44 Yes, it is a school to-day, but there was 
a time when the schoolrooms were the 
wards of a military hospital.” 

44 Were there ever any well-known peo¬ 
ple living here? ” asked Frank. 44 1 never 
knew the Rocks were old like this, or had 
any history about them.” 


122 When I Was a Girl in Australia 


“ Many of the older statesmen lived 
here, but you wouldn’t know who they 
were if I told you about them. You 
haven’t learned enough yet. But there 
is one you probably remember, a very 
clever man, and very witty, too—Sir 
George Reid. Most boys remember him 
if they have ever seen his picture, because 
he was a big, fat man with a very round 
face. He lived here when he was a boy, 
and so did the Mitchell family, the ones 
who gave the lovely Mitchell library to 
Sydney.” 

We were standing on one of the best 
points of the Rocks from which to obtain 
a view. From our position we could see 
the great span of the nearly completed 
bridge with ferry-boats and tugs and 
freighters and a huge Aberdeen Liner 
going underneath. We watched the scene 
in silence. Uncle Don was thinking; I 
could tell by the look in his eyes. Then 
he slipped his arm around my shoulders, 



123 


Old Sydney 

and looking still at the harbor and the 
ships, he said, “ The dream of a convict.” 

“ What do you mean? ” I asked him, 
and Frank added, “ What did a convict 
dream? Which convict, anyway? ” 

“ The bridge which we shall all be trav¬ 
elling over next year was first thought of 
by a prisoner. It was as long ago as 1815, 
too. But every one laughed at him, of 
course. When he spoke of a bridge so 
large that it could cross from one shore 
to the other, from Sydney to the suburb 
of North Sydney, it seemed like sheer 
nonsense in those days. Engineers could 
not build bridges that size; they couldn’t 
even plan them.” 

‘‘Was he an engineer? ” Frank ques¬ 
tioned. We could hear the rivet ting ham¬ 
mers on the steel. 

“ No. He was a lawyer by profession, 
and his name was Greenway. He had 
been sent to the settlement for some dis¬ 
honesty in money matters in England, 


124 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

and the governor—Governor Macquarie 
at that time—allowed him to practise in 
the city. He was a very able man, and 
he certainly guessed very well when he 
told people that they should buy land on 
the lonely foreshores across the harbor. 
He was right when he said it would one 
day be as valuable as the city itself.” 

North Sydney is almost a continuation 
of Sydney, with just the width of the 
harbor in between. It is to Sydney what 
Brooklyn is to New York, or Oakland 
to San Francisco. We could see the traf¬ 
fic and the buildings in the distance. 

As we turned around, we looked into 
the heart of Sydney. Its streets cut 
through the town appeared like ribbons 
thronged with insects from where we 
stood, for they were alive with moving 
vehicles and people. 

“ Just one hundred and sixty years 
since Governor Phillip came,” said Uncle 
Don, “and look at it now! What 



125 


Old Sydney 

changes! And for how long there was 
nothing known of the country except this 
little part of New South Wales, and now 
even the name of ‘ New Holland ’ is prac¬ 
tically forgotten! ” 

“ How did the rest of the country grow, 
Uncle Don? ” I asked. 

“ There were simply scattered settle¬ 
ments to begin with. They were far 
apart, and all of them were rivals,” he 
said, as we began to retrace our steps 
towards the Quay. “ Groups of people 
gathered together and made small col¬ 
onies, much as they did in America and 
Canada in early days. As they developed, 
they became rivals, and instead of helping 
each other to expand, they were antago¬ 
nistic. One example of this lack of agree¬ 
ment was the difference in the railway 
gauges. The N. S. W. and the Victorian 
trains ran on different-sized tracks, so we 
had to change trains in order to go from 
Sydney to Melbourne. It was a sad state 


126 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

of affairs until Sir Henry Parkes thought 
of federation.” 

Frank and I looked up questioningly. 
We had never heard the word, nor known 
what it was that had made Sir Henry 
Parkes so popular, although, like all Aus¬ 
tralians, we were perfectly familiar with 
his name and the pictures of his kind old 
face with its big white beard. 

“ Federation means that colonies in the 
same land become united, just as the 
States of America became united, and the 
provinces of Canada became a dominion. 
Making small settlements or divisions of 
a country see the advantages of forming 
a whole is no easy matter. It means a 
lot of work and a lot of planning, to say 
nothing of the length of time that it needs, 
as well. Sir Henry Parkes put the idea 
before the people in a speech as far back 
as 1867. Nobody agreed with him at all, 
and if he hadn’t been a very great man 
and had a very remarkable character, he 


Old Sydney 127 

would never have bothered to stick to his 
ideas. But he knew that Australia could 
never progress while it was so divided, 
and he persisted in working to bring all 
the colonies together. He worked for 
thirty-five years, persuading, writing, ne¬ 
gotiating in England, and speaking to the 
people. He died in 1896, and he still had 
not brought about the union of the States, 
which by that time had become what they 
are now.” 

“ New South Wales, Victoria, South 
Australia, West Australia, the Northern 
Territory, and Queensland,” announced 
Frank. “ I know that much, anyway.” 

“ But we have a federation now, haven’t 
we? ” I asked. “We are all united, aren’t 
we? ” 

“ But what a time it took to manage 
it!” smiled Uncle Don. “It was 1901 
before the first governor-general arrived 
from England to govern the Common¬ 
wealth of Australia for the King! ” 


128 When 1 Was a Girl in Australia 

When we were back on Circular Quay 
near the wharf where we were to board 
the ferry for Mosman, Frank and I 
lagged behind Uncle Don. 

“ Pretty dry afternoon,” whispered 
Frank quickly, hut I bristled up when he 
said that. 

“ Uncle Don didn’t say he was taking 
us to town for fun,” I said. “ He told 
us it was for our education.” 

As a matter of fact, I was thinking 
secretly that our uncle might have given 
us a tiny bit of amusement along with 
the education, when, just as we were pass¬ 
ing a candy store, he turned towards us 
and changed my opinion of him by asking 
if we would like an ice-cream. 

We were outside Sargeant’s. Every 
one in Sydney knows Sargeant’s. There 
are branches all over the city, and no cafe 
is so famous for its meat pies and cakes. 
But we did not have meat pies with Uncle 
Don; we had lovely apricot ices with thin 


129 


Old Sydney 

sugar wafers, and we ate them up on a 
balcony where we could look down at the 
passing ships in the harbor. A barquen- 
tine, its sails curved in the wind, was head¬ 
ing for the Pacific, and the first shadows 
of evening were lengthening along the op¬ 
posite shores. 

“ I suppose you children would rather 
have spent the day on the beach,” our 
uncle said, almost as though he had 
guessed my thoughts. “ But I am glad 
you came with me, because I don’t think 
you will ever forget the things I’ve told 
you to-day. And everybody should know 
his own country—travel in it, see it, and 
understand it from one end to the other. 
There is no need to go away to find in¬ 
teresting things, you know. Seeing other 
places is all very well, but seeing your 
own land is just as interesting.” 

Frank and I looked at each other, but 
we didn’t say a word. We both knew 
that we did not agree with Uncle Don. 


130 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

We were dreaming of the far-away ends 
of the earth, even when we were quite 
small, and we always found other coun¬ 
tries ever so much more interesting than 
our own! 


CHAPTER IX 


THE OLD DAYS 

At the far end of our beach there was 
a swimming bath like the one at the Spit, 
but not quite so big. Beyond it, off the 
sand and just at the first fringe of the 
bush, an old man used to build boats. 
Frank and I loved to sit beside him and 
listen while he talked about the ships. 

“ How big will this boat be when she’s 
finished? ” I asked. 

“ Fifty feet over all, she’ll be.” 

“ What kind of a ship is it? ” 

“ Schooner for the island trade . . . 

maybe. . . 

With dreamy eyes on the stark iron- 
bark ribs cut from the bush about us, I 
tried to picture the future of the little 
boat. Like a far-off scene of a fairy- 

131 


132 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

land, I used to dream of the schooner, 
with white sails fluttering from its masts, 
drifting in the lee of palm-topped islands 
—with Frank and me at the helm! 

But Frank was more practical. He 
liked to “ get down to brass tacks.” 
“ Are you very old, Joey? ” he ques¬ 
tioned, and the old man’s blue eyes 
twinkled for a minute. 

“ Well, now, maybe I am a wee bit old¬ 
ish, but I’m a bit youngish, too! ” 

“Yes, I know—but I mean do you re¬ 
member the olden days in Sydney? ” 

“ There were no real olden days here, 
child. Australia is a young country. But 
she’s a strong country. In a hundred and 
fifty years Sydney’s grown to be the fifth- 
largest port in the British Empire. She 
is a great port, and I remember when she 
was filled with no other ships but sail. 
When I was a young lad, the first steam¬ 
ship that had ever come to Sydney was 
still to be seen in the harbor. I remember 



133 


The Old Days 

going on board her once. An old-style 
paddle-wheel, she was, called the Sophia 
Jane . Not long afterwards we began to 
build steamships of our own, and Sydney 
began to get modern. The Peninsular 
and Orient Line started its mail service 
from England, and owned the first mail 
steamer ever seen here. Glide through 
the waves like a bird, she could. And 
when the mail came into Sydney in those 
days, there was more excitement than the 
biggest liner in the world could raise 
to-day.” 

“ Did you always live on the beach here, 
Joey? ” I asked, and the old boat-builder, 
thinking deeply before he replied, 
knocked the ashes from his pipe on the 
sole of his battered boot. 

“ No, no, lassie,” he mused. “ I was 
born in Williamstown, or so they called 
the city of Melbourne ’way back in 1845 
when I was born. The real Melbourne 
was only a little village on the Yarra 


134 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

River, higher up. When the town was 
founded, they called it after the King of 
England at that time, and Melbourne was 
named for his Prime Minister. But it’s 
many years now since it’s all been Mel¬ 
bourne.” 

Frank lay over on his side and sifted 
the snowy sand through his fingers. The 
wind played in the flapping leaves of the 
Moreton Bay fig-tree, and Joey puffed 
his pipe with a far-away look in his hard 
blue eyes. I did not want him to stop 
talking, so I thought of another question 
as quickly as I could. “ Melbourne is 
not as old as Sydney, is it, Joey? ” 

“ Not by a good many years. Her be¬ 
ginnings were very different, too. Round 
about ten years before I was born, a man 
named John Batman explored the coun¬ 
try near the mouth of the Yarra River, or 
Port Phillip, as it was called. Few white 
men had ever been there until then, and 
the land was owned by the native aborig- 


135 


The Old Days 

inal tribes, who made their camps and 
travelled from place to place exactly as 
they felt inclined. It looked like very 
valuable country to John Batman, so he 
gathered the chiefs of the tribes together 
and told them that he wished to buy the 
land. Talked their old black heads off, 
they did, arguing about the number of 
scissors and knives and blankets and look¬ 
ing-glasses they’d take in exchange for 
the six hundred thousand acres that Bat¬ 
man wanted. But they completed the 
deal, all right. The real trouble began 
when Batman tried to take over the land. 
It wasn’t the blackfellows who made all 
the fuss, but the English officials. For 
years and years they disputed Batman’s 
right to the property. First, one court 
would say it was legally his, and then an¬ 
other court would say it wasn’t. As a 
matter of fact, the whole deal was proved 
invalid, or no good, in the end, and Bat¬ 
man never claimed the city of Melbourne, 


136 When 1 Was a Girl in Australia 

although even to this day there are de¬ 
scendants of his who try to show their 
ownership of certain parts.” 

“ You’ve had a lot of adventure, haven’t 
you?” asked Frank. He knew already 
that Joey had been in the great Aus¬ 
tralian gold-rush, but he wanted to hear 
about it all again. Joey always forgot 
what he had said five minutes after he had 
said it, so we could always count on hear¬ 
ing a story over and over again if we 
questioned properly! 

“ Adventure enough to fill a book I’ve 
had,” replied old Joey. “ I went to the 
first gold-field in Australia when I was 
a lad of six, and I went through all the 
excitement and the misery of the gold- 
rush. I don’t really remember much 
about that early time, but my mother used 
to tell me how everybody went mad. 
Everybody became a miner. The black¬ 
smiths couldn’t turn out picks and crow¬ 
bars fast enough. We were living in 


137 


The Old Days 

Sydney when we heard of the gold-dig¬ 
gings at Ophir at the foot of the Blue 
Mountains. Within a few days my father, 
who was a journalist and had never han¬ 
dled anything heavier than a goose-quill 
pen, had shouldered a pickaxe and sold his 
home for next to nothing—everybody sold 
up or simply walked out—and we found 
ourselves in the wild procession that was 
headed for the gold-fields. It must have 
been a strange sight to see them—men, 
women, and children, some on horseback, 
but most of them just tramping, with tin 
basins and shovels and pots and pans 
dangling on all sides. Some were so fool¬ 
ish that they set out with no preparations 
at all, so that they fainted or collapsed 
on the road long before the diggings were 
in sight. In many ways the gold discovery 
was a terrible thing for Australia, because 
everything else was deserted. Nobody 
wanted to be a farmer any more. No¬ 
body wanted to do any ordinary kind of 



138 When 1 Was a Girl in Australia 

work if he could get rich quickly by find¬ 
ing gold. My father told me that on the 
road between Parramatta and the Ophir 
fields he once counted eight hundred peo¬ 
ple, and most of them were nothing more 
than beggars, having given up everything 
they had in one mad minute. It is queer 
when we think of it now, but at that time 
it was not uncommon for fathers to leave 
their families, to give up good positions, 
and to set out recklessly for the gold¬ 
mines. Very few of these thoughtless 
people ever reached Ophir, of course. 
They either starved to death or crawled 
back home again. 

“ The diggings at Ophir Avere especially 
bad for Melbourne and the various settle¬ 
ments in that part of the country. Thou¬ 
sands of people crossed the border into 
NeAv South Wales, and the situation be¬ 
gan to look so desperate that the officials 
offered a big reward to any one who 
should discover gold in the State of Vic- 


139 


The Old Days 

toria. They did, too. They found two 
of the greatest gold-fields in the world 
at Bendigo and Ballarat. Changed the 
whole story, that did. All the folks who 
had rushed to the Ophir fields picked up 
their trappings and set out for Victoria, 
my dad among them. From that time 
on, things began to look lively. In one 
week alone four thousand immigrants ar¬ 
rived in Melbourne, and by the time that 
I was sixteen, Australia had produced 
over one hundred million pounds’ worth 
of gold. Ninety-three millions had come 
from the Victorian mines, where I had 
grown up.” 

“That’s a lot of money!” whispered 
Frank with admiration. “ Did your 
father make much out of it himself? ” 

“ Made it and lost it,” sighed Joey, “ or 
I wouldn’t have been these twenty years 
building boats on a beach, I wouldn’t. 
I’d maybe own a boat instead.” 

“Who first found the gold in Aus- 


140 When 1 Was a Girl in Australia 

tralia? ” I asked. That was one of the 
few things Joey had never told us. 

“ Well, the first cry of ‘ Gold! ’ came 
from California. The first great gold- 
rush was over there, and among the men 
who sailed across the Pacific in search of 
gold in America was a man named Har¬ 
graves, Edward Hammond Hargraves. 
He was an Australian, and he had been 
working for about fifteen years in the 
country round about the Blue Mountains, 
always within forty or fifty miles of Syd¬ 
ney. While he was in California, he made 
a lot of money out of his gold claims, and 
he also met the American writer, Bret 
Harte. One day it suddenly struck him 
that the country was very like the one he 
had left. The more he thought about it, 
the more certain he became that he would 
find gold in his own homeland. As soon 
as he had made enough money to show a 
good profit on his outlay in California, he 
hurried back to New South Wales and 


The Old Bays 141 

made for the foothills of the Blue Moun¬ 
tains. In January, 1851, he washed the 
first pan of gravel to yield gold in 
Australia.’’ 

I had been thinking about the year in 
which Joey said he had been born—1845. 
That must have been about the time when 
the bushrangers and the blackfellows 
roamed the bush in search of plunder. 
“ Did you ever see any bushrangers? ” I 
asked. 

“ Bushrangers! ” the old man repeated. 
“ Knew ’em all, I did. Leastways, I knew 
something of them all. Of course, the 
first bushrangers were before my time. 
They were escaped prisoners, mostly, who 
lived by robbery, but after the gold dis¬ 
covery another kind of bushranger started 
business, much more serious than the 
small robber bands who wandered in the 
bush in the earlier days. You see, a great 
many of the people who rushed to the 
gold-fields were bad characters, anyway, 


142 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

and when they were disappointed over the 
amount of gold they found, they natu¬ 
rally decided to rob the ones who had had 
better luck. They formed gangs and or¬ 
ganized themselves so well that the task 
of bringing the gold to the banks from 
the diggings became one of the most dif¬ 
ficult and dangerous journeys in the 
world at that time. In some districts the 
people had to form volunteer corps to 
protect themselves. Hold-ups occurred 
almost every day. The settlers, and even 
some of the gold escorts, were badly 
armed, and bushranging was an easy way 
to make money quickly. The bigger 
gangs had extraordinary luck. They 
simply robbed and plundered whenever 
they pleased. Especially daring was a 
gang under the leadership of a man 
named Gardiner. They waylaid the gold 
escort going to Sydney once, and escaped 
with no less than fifteen thousand pounds 
in gold. I could never understand why 


143 


The Old Days 

people always seemed to side with the 
bushrangers, but they did. Even when 
Gardiner was captured and sentenced to 
thirty years in prison, the outcry was so 
persistent that he was finally freed after 
ten years.” 

Joey shifted his position so that he lay 
full-length on the warm sand. Frank and 
I lay facing him so that we could hear 
him talking while we buried our hands 
and then uncovered them, over and over 
again. 

“ The next famous bushranger was Ben 
Hall. He didn’t last as long as Gardiner, 
though. He was hunted down and shot. 
The outlaws who followed him were more 
brutal, and for some time bushranging 
seemed to lose the romance which, in spite 
of everything, people had found in it. 
For quite a long time every hand in the 
country was turned against the robbers. 
Some of the more successful did not use 
their own names, and two of the most 


144 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

notorious outlaws who ever waylaid a 
coach or robbed a bank were known as 
‘ Starlight’ and ‘ Thunderbolt.’ Of 
course I remember the Kelly gang best of 
all, because it was the last one. They 
were a murderous group. They robbed in 
every direction, and yet, because they 
could always find some one to sympathize 
with and shelter them, it was two years 
before they were captured. I remember 
the excitement everywhere on the day the 
police finally fought it out with those rob¬ 
bers. All of them were shot except the 
leader, Ned Kelly. I was in Melbourne 
when they executed him—he was the last 
of the bushrangers.” 

“ What was the most exciting adven¬ 
ture you ever had, Joey? ” I asked. 

For some moments the old man stroked 
his full white beard. “ I think the most 
exciting thing I ever did was also the 
most disgraceful,” he said thoughtfully. 
“ I rebelled against the Victorian Govern- 



145 


The Old Days 

ment. At that time I was just about six¬ 
teen years old, and I was mining with my 
father at a place called Lambing Flat. 
The town of Young is built there now, 
but it was a rich gold-field then. There 
were round about twenty thousand people 
at the diggings. We were producing at 
least three thousand ounces of gold a 
week, but the place was full of Chinese. 
A dirty lot, we told ourselves, they were, 
though I don’t suppose they were any 
worse, as miners go, than the rest of us. 
But I didn’t see it that way when I was 
sixteen, and when I heard that the white 
diggers were going to band together to 
put the Chinese out of the fields, I was 
well in the thick of it. First of all, we 
went to the Resident Commissioner, and, 
fired by a feeling of hatred against the 
Chinkies—there were about fifteen hun¬ 
dred of them altogether—we told him we 
were going to chase them out. If there 
had been more police, I am sure we should 




146 When 1 Was a Girl in Australia 

have found that the end of our battle. 
But there were only a few at that time, 
and there was nothing to stop us from 
marching down on the Chinamen and tell¬ 
ing them to get out of the place within 
two hours. I am ashamed of myself now, 
but I absolutely hated the Chinese in 
those days. I tore into their camp and 
shrieked as loud as any one. We ill- 
treated them, there is no denying it, but 
the worse the fighting became, the more 
1 rushed into it. We didn’t settle down 
quietly again until a detachment of sol¬ 
diers was sent from Sydney. We saw 
that they meant business the minute they 
appeared, but by this time both sides were 
far beyond control. Six men were killed, 
and over a hundred wounded. I was 
among the hundred.” He pulled his shirt 
from his seamy brown shoulder and 
showed us the scar that ran from his chest 
to the top of his arm. “ That’s what I 
got out of it. And it served me jolly 


147 


The Old Days 

well right, too. I never wanted to be a 
rebel any more after that. I only wish 
it had cured me of gold-digging. I 
wouldn’t have to build this pesky little 
schooner now, if I hadn’t wasted all my 
young days in the mining-camps.” He 
straightened himself up and slowly fitted 
an iron-bark plank into place. I watched 
him, thinking of my country’s past and 
drifting into dreams for the future, for 
my own future, for Frank’s, for Aus¬ 
tralia’s, and for the future of old Joey’s 
little schooner, destined for the island 
trade maybe—a link between my own city 
and the far Pacific, as sailing ships had 
linked the colony with all the world in 
days gone by. 


CHAPTER X 


A LADY FROM TASMANIA 

Our neighbors had a solid wooden fence 
that ran a good distance along the top of 
the gully between our garden and theirs, 
right to the edge of the cliff. It was too 
high to see over. In Australia, we spend 
so much of our lives in our gardens that 
they have to be private. The American 
custom of having no fences would not be 
comfortable in Australia, because our gar¬ 
dens are for use—like a room of the house, 
almost. 

Just at the head of the gully our neigh¬ 
bors’ gate was cut in a solid piece with a 
curved top that fitted into the fence below 
an antique lantern on a bracket. Inside, 
a pathway made of odd flat stones divided 
into two. One way led up to our neigh- 

148 



A Lady from Tasmania 149 

hors’ house, and the other led down 
towards a tiny whitewashed cottage at the 
edge of the cliff. Between the two paths 
under a gnarled old gum-tree, whose 
boughs were low over the lawn, there was 
a rockery covered with rock lilies trailing 
everywhere like patches of colored silk, 
pink and red and yellow and white. There 
were goldfish in the middle, and queer 
aboriginal drawings carved on a section of 
flowerless stone. The pictures had been 
chipped there by the blackfellows many, 
many years before a white man ever 
landed in Sydney, and they were simply 
outlines of fish or people with lines for 
mouths and dots for eyes, such as little 
children draw. All round Sydney these 
pictures can be found on the rocks. The 
most famous are at a place called 
Maroota Park, a suburb of Sydney, where 
the aboriginals, or “ abos,” as they are 
called usually, have drawn pictures of 
gods and evil spirits, one of which is over 


150 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

fourteen feet high. The blacks called all 
spirits “ debil-debils,” and the ones at 
Maroota have horns on their heads and 
ever so many toes, though the rest of their 
bodies are really very ordinary—not to 
say plain! 

Frank and I were always putting our 
weight against our neighbors’ heavy gate 
because we liked to visit the old lady who 
lived in the tiny cottage. She was a very 
small person with a pink face and snow- 
white hair. She always wore a striped 
apron as spotless as herself and every¬ 
thing else she ever touched, and she used 
to tell us tales about Tasmania, which had 
once been her home. 

“ Did you ever go to Port Arthur, Mrs. 
Findley?” I said to her one day when 
Frank and I were sitting side by side on 
her little kitchen sofa. I hoped in this 
way to start her telling us something 
about Tasmania, which is a large island 
off the coast of Australia. Port Arthur 



Australian Aboriginals 
Usually called “abos. ” 






A Lady from Tasmania 151 

was the biggest and the last convict set¬ 
tlement under British rule in the An¬ 
tipodes. (Australia and the islands 
grouped about her are sometimes called 
the Antipodes.) 

“ Yes, I’ve seen Port Arthur. It’s not 
a very nice place to see, either, and I am 
glad those cruel things are over now,” she 
answered, busily pressing some pieces of 
black cloth on her ironing-board. 

“ Did you ever know anybody who had 
been a real convict? ” I asked. 

“ Lots and lots of them,” she mur¬ 
mured, wrinkling her shiny forehead over 
the problem of the black cloth. It did 
not seem to be quite to her taste, some¬ 
how. 

“You really knew convicts!” Frank 
exclaimed. “ What did they look like? 
Did they have striped suits and little 
round hats like the ones in American 
movies? ” 

Mrs. Findley did not answer for a 


152 When 1 Was a Girl in Australia 

while. She made distressed clicking 
sounds over all the tiny bits of cloth which 
she was trying to fit together, baste, and 
press into place. At last she sat down 
to sew in front of the window. Her beau¬ 
tiful white head, so much kinder, some¬ 
how, than any one else’s I have ever seen, 
was framed in the fringe of nasturtiums 
that climbed up the cottage walls outside. 

“ What were convicts like, you asked. 
Well, they were just exactly like any¬ 
body else when I knew them. They had 
been freed for years, and of course they 
didn’t have striped suits after they were 
free. Mostly, they were well-educated 
gentlemen doing workmen’s jobs. Some 
had been so long in the convict settle¬ 
ments that they didn’t take much interest 
in anything. It was hard, you know, to 
have been punished so dreadfully for such 
small crimes as most of them had com¬ 
mitted. I knew one man who had been 
fifteen years at Port Arthur, working in 


A ~Lady from Tasmania 153 

a chain-gang, all because he made a 
speech! In these days almost any poli¬ 
tician says more than the words that this 
man went to Port Arthur for.” 

“ So you couldn’t tell a person who had 
been a convict from one who hadn’t? ” 
Frank persisted. He seemed to think it 
was not possible for them to be alike. 

“ I didn’t say that, Frank.” Mrs. 
Findley shook her head sadly. “ Those 
who had been in prison at Port Arthur 
for any length of time would have to walk 
till their dying day with the awful drag¬ 
ging step of men who had been shackled 
to a ball and chain until their legs could 
never again be natural.” 

Both Frank and I were awed to hear 
about that. We longed to ask her more 
about it, but she looked very unhappy. 

“ Hush! She might not like to talk 
about it,” I whispered to Frank. 

44 Tasmania grows good apples,” I said, 
because I wanted to change the subject. 


154 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

Mrs. Findley went back to the ironing- 
board again, but she still seemed worried 
and uncertain about her work. Frank 
and I went and leaned on one end of her 
board. There were fancy tea-tins on the 
mantel over the fireplace, and a grand¬ 
father clock that ticked very loudly be¬ 
side the door. 

“ What are you making? ” I asked at 
last. 

“ A dress suit for my husband to wear 
at a Masonic dinner to-morrow night. 
But O deary me, it’s a hard thing to 
make.” And she gave a great big sigh. 

She was the only person I ever knew 
who tried to make a dress suit, but her 
husband, gaunt and grey-moustached, 
wore it very proudly to the dinner. 
Frank and I waited at the gate to see 
him go up the hill in his new clothes, and 
his wife’s cleverness seemed truly wonder¬ 
ful to us. 


CHAPTER XI 


HOLIDAYS 

Australia is a great place for holi¬ 
days. They celebrate English anniver¬ 
saries, besides a number of occasions that 
are not celebrated in England. 

One of the greatest holidays of the year 
is Empire Day, the twenty-fourth of 
May, when bonfires are lit and fire¬ 
crackers set off. After we went to live 
near the beach, we always made our Em¬ 
pire Day bonfire on the edge of the sea. 
It was made of all the gum-tree branches 
and twigs we could carry, and sometimes 
it was about six feet high. The smell of 
the burning Eucalyptus leaves and wood 
was wonderful. Nothing else in the world 
smells quite like it, and when Australians 
leave the country, their friends often send 

155 


156 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

them boxes of gum-tree leaves to burn. 
It reminds them of home as nothing else 
can. 

On Empire Day we used to have cakes 
and candies, and usually our little friends 
from round about the beach came to our 
house to see Daddy fire a salute from our 
toy cannon. It was a real model cannon, 
and it fired 12-gauge shotgun blank cart¬ 
ridges. 

Another great Australian national holi¬ 
day is Eight Hour Day, when all the 
tradespeople celebrate the passing of the 
law that shortened the working day. 
Eight hours of work, eight hours of sleep, 
and eight hours of recreation seemed a 
fair division of the day to the Australians. 
In one of the big cities there is a statue 
featuring the figure eight in memory of 
this arrangement. 

The chief attraction on Eight Hour 
Day is the parade of the trades. Each 
branch of workers has a section in the 


Holidays 157 

procession, with its own floats, banners, 
and pantomimes. The printers, carpen¬ 
ters, butchers, bakers, dairymen, and in 
fact every industry or business is repre¬ 
sented. Very often the floats are ar¬ 
ranged like the workshops of the trades 
they feature. For instance, the bakers 
have a real kitchen where the men are 
busy actually baking little loaves in the 
ovens and throwing them out into the 
crowds on the streets. Candy-makers, and 
sometimes fruit-preservers, do the same 
thing, and almost everybody who attends 
the parade comes home with mementoes 
and samples which were thrown from the 
various floats. 

The schools have a two-weeks’ holiday 
at Easter, and that is the time when the 
famous Sydney Show is held. Exhibits 
of all the best cattle, sheep, wheat, wool, 
machinery, fruits, and other products of 
the Australian Commonwealth are shown. 
Everybody goes to the Show, and al- 


158 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

though it is held every year, people see it 
over and over again, especially on Good 
Friday, when the crowds are so dense that 
there is hardly room to move. 

On November fifth the Australians 
celebrate a very old English holiday. It 
is known as Guy Fawkes Day, and it 
dates back to the days of King James I, 
or about fifteen years before the May¬ 
flower sailed for America. 

Guy Fawkes lived in London, Eng¬ 
land. He wore the wide-awake hat and 
doublet which you have seen in the Pil¬ 
grim Fathers’ pictures, and he was a very 
bad man. He plotted against the English 
King, and his schemes were so well laid 
that he had managed to hide barrels of 
gunpowder in the cellars of the Parlia¬ 
ment House, where the government made 
laws on the banks of the river Thames. 
It is a beautiful building, and stands for 
a great deal in the lives of English people, 
and it would have been a terrible disaster 


Holidays 159 

if Guy Fawkes had not been discovered. 
On November fifth, 1605, however, the 
whole plot was found out, and Guy 
Fawkes and another conspirator were 
executed. 

Ever since that time it has been the 
custom to light huge bonfires and burn 
effigies of Guy Fawkes on that date. We 
used to stuff old clothes full of straw, soak 
them with kerosene, and let them burn 
while we sang a little rhyme which went: 

“ Always remember the fifth of November, 

Gunpowder, treason, and plot. . . .” 

One of the great days, which Frank 
and I enjoyed almost more than any other 
in Sydney, was the Greater Public 
Schools Regatta. 

It was held on a river called the Par¬ 
ramatta, which opens out of the main part 
of the harbor. 

Frank and I usually went up the river 
in a friend’s motor launch. Out of the 


160 When 1 Was a Girl in Australia 

harbor we joined a swarm of boats, toot¬ 
ing and careering in every direction to 
avoid collision in the wild stampede for 
the course of the race, which was between 
the crews of the big Sydney public 
schools. 

Ferry-boats crowded with people, call¬ 
ing excitedly as they went along, barely 
missed the decorated barges and pleasure 
boats of every size and description, which 
floated streamers of flags to show which 
crews they favored to win. 

Frank and I cheered for the Sydney 
Church of England Grammar School, and 
every time a boat went by with colors 
from any other school, we leaned out and 
shrieked, “ Gram-m-a-a-rr! ” as loud as 
we could, and tried to drown the hostile 
replies of “ Scots! ” or “ ’View! ” which 
was short for one of the Catholic colleges 
named “ Riverview.” 

* 

Past the suburbs that lined the river we 
travelled. The air was athrill with voices, 


Holidays 161 

with faint music coming from the inner 
cabins of the ferries and larger boats, and 
with the piercing sirens of dirty tugboats 
full of excited people from the industrial 
and shipping areas of the city. 

On the way up we went past the sub¬ 
urb of Longueville, which is the home of 
the aviator, Flight-Commander Kings- 
ford-Smith. 

Near the starting point of the race be¬ 
low the ferry-stop for Riverview College, 
the boats were jammed together so that 
the water police could hardly control them 
and keep the course clear for the race. 
Most of the smaller boats outside the rac¬ 
ing-line followed the skiffs up the river, 
cheering and yelling as loudly as possible. 
Huge crowds waited to cheer the winning 
crew at the bridge. 

On the way back everybody discussed 
the winners. If it happened to be the 
Grammar School crew, Frank and I 
leaned out and called, “ Hurrah for 


162 When 1 Was a Girl in Australia 

Grammar—good old Grammar 1 ” to 
every other boat we saw. 

Every year the suburbs along the 
water-front of Sydney have a Venetian 
Night. It is something like a water car¬ 
nival, with boats decked with flowers and 
colored lights anchored in the coves, and 
everybody singing or playing some kind 
of music till the harbor echoes with laugh¬ 
ing voices and splashing oars. 


CHAPTER XII 


ANOTHER SCHOOL 

The time came when Frank and I had 
to go to a real school again. There was 
much discussion about where we should 
go. Daddy wanted us to go to a day- 
school in Sydney, but Mother said it 
would be better if we went to the nearest 
school in our own suburb. She did not 
want us to go so far as the city, and 
Frank and I wanted to go together. So 
it was finally decided that we should go 
to the public school, which was not very 
far away. 

Every morning we went up the hill and 
boarded the street-car, which took us to 
the door of the school on one of the main 
roads in the busiest part of Mosman. 

We went into the school yard and sep- 

163 


164 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

arated, because we were out of the infants’ 
class by this time and had to go with other 
children of our own sex. The boys lined 
up in their yard, and the girls went into 
theirs. 

As soon as the boys’ fife-and-drum band 
struck up, we marched by classes into the 
schoolrooms. 

The band was so much a part of the 
school life that we never went anywhere 
without it. There were about fourteen 
boys playing in it, ranging from eight or 
nine to fifteen or so. One boy played a 
big bass drum. Four others had kettle¬ 
drums, and the rest had fifes or flutes. 
They played simple marches, mostly. 
What they lacked in artistic merit was 
fully made up for by vigorous enthusiasm. 
It was a great honor to be in the band. 

On Monday mornings we used to have 
religious instruction. The children of the 
various denominations separated into 
groups, boys and girls together, and un- 


Another School 


165 


der the leadership of their own pastors 
filed into classes for their lessons. The 
Church of England minister had charge 
of one group, and the Roman Catholic 
priest, the Baptist minister, or the Pres¬ 
byterian minister led others. 

Our family life was a little different 
from most, because we had no strict re¬ 
ligious training. Although we belonged 
to the Church of England, we did not go 
to church very often, and we were rarely 
sent to Sunday School. So long as we 
said the prayers which Mother taught us 
when we were small, nothing else was in¬ 
sisted upon in our home. The atmosphere 
was one of great tolerance, and the prin¬ 
ciples of good conduct were more impor¬ 
tant than prayers. But, of course, our 
prayers were not neglected. 

During the hours of religious instruc¬ 
tions at the public school, I had to read 
passages from the Bible and learn long 
verses from the Psalms. I never under- 


166 When 1 Was a Girl in Australia 

stood any of it properly, but when Mother 
or Gracie read us the simpler Bible stories 
at home, I loved them. 

On Friday afternoons in the summer 
months the boys’ classes used to go down 
to the swimming baths at the end of our 
beach, where they were taught to swim 
and dive and the rudiments of life-saving. 
Long before the file of boys could be seen 
marching down the winding clay roads 
to the beach level, the piping and drum¬ 
ming of the band could be heard. I think 
their favorite marching tune was called 
“ The Men of Harlech.” What they 
played always sounded like the same piece 
to me, but I dare say there were really 
many different tunes, and it was merely 
the unchangeable beat that made it seem 
like one long repetition. 

The girls had to go to the swimming 
baths without the band, and the day that 
we went was our favorite day in the week. 

Frank and I went to the public school 


Another School 


167 


for several years, and I would hate to tell 
how many times we were late! 

Going up the hill in the lovely dewy 
mornings, there was always so much to 
do. If we had a few minutes to spare, 
we knew so many ways of using them that 
I sometimes wonder how we ever reached 
school at all. 

“ We’re quite early to-day,” I would 
say to Frank. “How about going into 
the bush to find lilly-pillies? ” 

“ Good-oh ” was always Frank’s en¬ 
thusiastic reply to suggestions like that, 
and off the track we would go, pushing 
our way through the densely packed un¬ 
derbrush. Sometimes we went past the 
spiky bottle-brush trees with flowers like 
scarlet brushes, exactly the same shape as 
those which are used for washing the 
inside of bottles, and sometimes into the 
“ spider-bushes ” with flowers hanging in 
among the leaves like long-legged, deep 
red spiders, until we found the small 


168 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

green berries called lilly-pillies. They 
tasted rather sour, but looking for them 
was more fun than going straight to 
school. 

If we happened to see a flock of little 
birds fluttering about a certain tree, we 
could never go past without stopping to 
share their picnic. 

44 Must be a lot of honey in the honey- 
flowers. Come on,” I would say, and into 
the bush we would go, as usual. 

The honey-flowers were long bell¬ 
shaped blossoms, shading from red to yel¬ 
low, and the store of honey that we could 
find when we slipped the bell from its 
little green cup was quite worth the time 
we spent on it. 

One morning, turning the corner of the 
trail between our house and the beginning 
of the hill, we came face to face with one 
of the “ swagmen,” as Australian hoboes 
or tramps are called. It was unusual to 
see one so near the city, because these men 


> 



Photograph by Keystone 


Russell Falls 

In the National Park, South Australia. 








Another School 


169 


usually spend all their lives wandering 
from one station to another out in the 
lonely trails of the bush. Now and again 
they work for a day or two, chopping 
wood or doing other odd jobs for the 
station owners, but more often than not 
they reach a homestead just at the end of 
the day and beg a night’s rest and a new 
supply of tea, flour, and bacon, which 
they carry away in their swags, or 
bundles. From their habit of arriving in 
the evenings, they are often called “ sun¬ 
downers.” 

When an Australian takes to the roads 
as a tramp, he is said to be “ humping his 
bluey ” because, in addition to his tin 
billy-can and his swag of provisions, he 
also carries a blue blanket to sleep in at 
night. 

Going up the hill to school, Frank and 
I met many strange people. Sometimes 
we would see a man coming along with 
a bundle of long, thin gum-saplings with 


170 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

a fork at one end and a point at the 
other. Every few steps he would say, in 
a long-drawn-out call that echoed through 
all the bush, “ Clothes-pr-r-ops, clothes- 
pr-r-ops!” When clothes are dried on 
lines slung across the grass in the gar¬ 
dens, as they are in Sydney, clothes-props 
to hold the lines high up in the wind are 
very necessary, and the saplings answer 
the purpose beautifully. The fork lifts 
the line into the air, and the sharpened 
end holds firmly in the ground. 

In the proper season we would also 
meet the strawberry-man, going down to 
the houses along the beach with his basket 
on his arm and his hat well over his eyes, 
and singing in a high-pitched voice, 
“ Strawberry, strawberry, very nice 
strawberry!” over and over again. We 
thought his call fascinating. 

If by any chance we happened to see a 
rickety old cart bumping down the steep 
hill at such a rate that it did not seem 


Another School 


171 


possible for the driver in the frayed hat, 
sleeveless singlet, and dirty trousers to 
keep his place on the board across the 
front, or for the bony horse to keep on 
its overworked legs, Frank and I simply 
had to rush back to the house. At what¬ 
ever cost, we could not miss the chance to 
do business with this man. 

Every time he could get his breath or 
take his attention from the difficulties of 
getting down the hill, he would yell, 
“ Bottle—oh, bottle—oh, any old bottle— 
oh! ” He bought empty bottles, and, as 
Frank and I always had an eye out for 
any bottles left on the beach or in the 
bush, we usually had quite a store of 
them hidden under the house, where 
Mother was not likely to discover them. 
She would never have allowed us to do it, 
and our business negotiations with the 
bottle-man were always very secret. I 
really do not know why we liked to go 
to so much trouble for the few cents we 




172 When 1 Was a Girl in Australia 

made, but I suppose it was just because 
it happened to be the fashion, and all the 
other children living near us did the same. 

Not long after we had started to go to 
the public school, somebody started to 
clear a block of land just at the foot of 
the hill, and pretty soon the workmen 
began to construct a house. Daddy was 
the architect, and it was to be a studio for 
an old artist, with a few simple rooms 
added for living quarters. 

Naturally this building was a very im¬ 
portant interest in our lives, and every 
morning Frank and I had to take time 
off from our trip to school in order to look 
the building over and note the progress 
made by the workmen. 

One morning, just as we got there, a 
carpenter with an axe in his hand was 
about to hack the head off a snake as it 
lay asleep on the top of a tree stump. 
Frank saw what was going to happen, 
and his face went red with rage. 


Another School 


173 


“ Get out! Get away! Don’t touch it! 
Give me the axe!” he screamed. The 
carpenter was so surprised that he handed 
it over, and looked quite stupid as he 
watched. Other men from the building 
gathered round as Frank crept up to the 
stump. Very carefully he selected his 
best position for the blow, and with one 
firm tap he hit the snake right in the 
center of the head and killed it. 

“ Don’t you know the skins are no good 
if you smash them up any old way? ” he 
said furiously to the carpenter. “ What 
do you mean, anyhow, spoiling good 
specimens like that? ” 

It turned out to be one of the largest 
and finest skins he ever had in his collec¬ 
tion. 

Once Frank and I did not get to school 
at all. When we got off the street-car, a 
big motion-picture theatre was on fire 
across the street. There were flames roar¬ 
ing into the sky, and clouds of smoke so 


174 When 1 Was a Girl in Australia 

dense that we could hardly see the sun 
through them. The main street was bar¬ 
ricaded, and cordons of police patrolled 
the crowds. It was the first time Frank 
and I had seen the fire-brigades in action. 
The streams of water pumped by manual 
engines, as they were at that time, poured 
on the burning building, and every so 
often walls or floors would collapse in 
showers of sparks. We were so near the 
front that we could see everything that 
happened, even when one of the firemen 
was hurt and had to be carried away in 
an ambulance. 

All the time we kept making remarks 
to each other. 

“ Supposing it had been on a Saturday 
and all the kids had been inside.” 

“ We’ll have a long way to go to the 
pictures now.” 

“ Do you think all the money was 
burned up in the ticket-office? ” 

By the time we remembered that we 


Another School 175 

were supposed to be in school, it was time 
to go home. 

On the way back we felt anything but 
happy. We had no idea what Daddy 
would say when he knew. 

We were not so miserable that we could 
not enjoy ourselves, however, and when 
we had started down the hill, I happened 
to notice a branch of ripe loquats hanging 
over a fence. 

“ I’ll get up and hold on to the top of 
the fence with one hand, and throw the 
loquats down to you with the other,” said 
Frank. 

He could just reach them, and as fast 
as he could tear from the tree the clusters 
of yellow fruit covered with heavy bloom, 
I gathered them into our linen hats. 

As we walked on with slow, dragging 
steps, we ate the thin covering of sweet 
pulp from the big smooth stones. 

“ I think Mother might like us to take 
her a bunch of flowers,” I said at last. 


176 When 1 Was a Girl in Australia 

“ It might be a good idea,” agreed 
Frank, and we delayed our home-coming 
a little longer by gathering a bunch of 
deep brown nasturtiums, which grew in 
a swampy patch of earth shaded from the 
sun by the trees, a spot so ideal for them 
that they looked like flowers cut from 
heavy velvet. They were great favorites 
of Mother’s, and when we gave them to 
her, her delight over our thoughtfulness 
was so sweet that we did not have the 
heart to say anything about the fire at 
the moving-picture theatre. 

When Daddy came home, Frank told 
him he wanted him to go for a little walk, 
and they disappeared up the trail to¬ 
gether. 

After we had gone to bed that night, I 
asked him if he had told Daddy about our 
not going to school, and he said he had, 
but when I tried to find out what Daddy 
had answered, Frank would not tell me 
at all. 


CHAPTER XIII 


GROWING UP 

For some reason the beginning of the 
Great War marked a great change in my 
outlook and ways of thinking. Up till 
that time I had been a child. I never 
thought about anything except playing 
with Frank and enjoying everything that 
came along. But I began to grow up in 
1914. France was a long way from Aus¬ 
tralia, but in spite of that, the war af¬ 
fected all we did. There were soldiers 
everywhere, and almost every family had 
worries for relatives or friends on the 
battlefields. 

I hated the war. I rebelled against it. 
Out on the edge of the cliff I used to sit 
and wonder why such things had to hap¬ 
pen. I could not see what good it would 

177 


178 When 1 Was a Girl in Australia 

ever do. I hated the solemn feeling that 
had come into our house since Grade’s 
sweetheart had been killed, and so many 
friends were wounded and missing. It 
made me dreamy and thoughtful because 
I could not understand it. Sometimes at 
night I used to creep down into my little 
garden and lie with my face among the 
violets, because I was so miserable, and 
did not know what to do about anything, 
and could not talk to Gracie or Mother 
or Daddy. 

Very soon we were all in a state of 
nervous tension, and Daddy decided that 
we should have a holiday. Frank was at 
boarding-school. Mother and Gracie went 
to stay with some friends in the country. 
Daddy took me to the shores of Lake 
Macquarie, near Newcastle. 

We took the train early one morning, 
and travelled up the coast on a railroad 
that is called the Illawarra Line. It was 
a very beautiful trip, through the pretty 


179 


Growing Up 

suburbs of Sydney, along the shores of 
the Hawkesbury River, past the quiet 
holiday resorts, and over the wide span of 
the Hawkesbury River bridge to the 
orchards of the New South Wales citrus 
belt, where they grow oranges and lemons 
in the district around Gosford. 

For several hours we watched the 
country rolling by, and then through the 
trees we could catch glimpses of the Tug- 
gerah Lakes, dotted with fishing-boats 
and shooting parties in search of ducks. 

It was midday when we finally reached 
Toronto (there is a Toronto in Aus¬ 
tralia) and started out along the narrow 
country bush tracks for the cottage where 
we were going to live for a few weeks. 
It was a small weather-board place with 
a wide verandah and steps that led down 
to the lake beyond the row of poplar trees 
and blue-gums. 

We had been there only a short time 
when we discovered an old aboriginal liv- 


180 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

ing by himself in a tent just a few hun¬ 
dred yards from us. His name was 
Jimmy Booka. 

One day when Daddy and I met Jimmy 
in the bush, he told us that he was the 
last of his tribe. They were called the 
Yarrayins, and they had lived on the 
Macquarie River. Of course he did not 
talk the way we do, because the aborig¬ 
inals use a kind of pidgin-English that is 
very difficult to understand. 

“ To-day I caught two iguanas,” 
Jimmy said, uncovering the big Aus¬ 
tralian lizards, which were hidden under 
some leaves. 

“ What are you going to do with 
them? ” Daddy asked. 

“ Eat them,” the blackfellow replied. 
“ Their heads are filled with sweet oil.” 
But I think it was only an idea of his 
own! 

Jimmy picked up the iguanas by their 
tails, and carefully folded an old overcoat 



Photograph by Keystone 

Jimmy Booka 







Growing Up 181 

on his arm. We had noticed before that 
Jimmy always took great care of his coat, 
so I could not help mentioning it to him: 
“ That is a very fine coat, Jimmy; where 
did you get it? ” 

“ Mr. Gover’ment House gave it to 
me,” he told us proudly. We found out 
afterwards that a member of Parliament 
had given it to him when he visited the 
black’s camp many years before. 

Apart from the overcoat, Jimmy had 
no other clothes except a ragged pair of 
trousers, but he wore a brass shield round 
his neck on a piece of chain. It had 
“ Hippi, the King of the Yarrayin 
Tribe ” written on it, but it did not really 
belong to him, for he explained: “ The 
king gave it to me when he died because 
there was nobody else left to keep it.” 

“ What are you doing around here? ” 
Daddy asked. He was very much in¬ 
terested in the old blackfellow, who was 
really a most uncommon person in every 


182 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

way. His beard was streaked with grey, 
and his wrinkled skin was like the hide of 
an old crocodile, but his eyes twinkled 
when he talked. “ Well, I’m busy look¬ 
ing after the aboriginal cemetery just at 
present,” he said. “ The king of the 
Dubbo tribe, who usually came every year 
to trim up the carvings, is dead, and he 
made me promise to keep them fresh as 
long as I live. Would you like to see the 
cemetery? ” 

Of course we wanted to, so we set off 
together through the bush. The sun 
made shadows of the gum-trees on the 
track, and there was a lovely perfume in 
the air because the wattle trees were all 
in bloom. They looked like sprays of 
yellow down, just the color of little 
ducklings. 

At last we came to a grove of gum- 
trees that were covered with strange carv¬ 
ings, and Jimmy took out his knife and 
began at once to chip and trim the later 


183 


Growing Up 

growth from a tree that had a low fence 
around it. “ This one is my mother’s 
grave,” he said. “ She died last year.” 

“ Last year? ” Daddy exclaimed, and 
we both stared at the old man. “ Your 
mother was alive a year ago? ” It seemed 
incredible. 

“ She was the oldest woman I’ve ever 
known among my people,” Jimmy in¬ 
formed us. “ She was over a hundred 
years old, and I looked after her all my 
life. It was the worst thing that ever 
happened to me when I had to make this 
grave under the trees. I burned every¬ 
thing she had ever owned, even the gun- 
yah [native hut] where we had lived.” 

When we looked about the cemetery, 
we could see that Jimmy had much 
work to do. The first year they were 
neglected, the bark would grow right over 
the carvings altogether. The time was 
fast coming when that would happen. 
Jimmy would not long be there to care 


184 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

for them, and soon the last memorials of 
the coastal tribes would all be gone. 

In some ways the Australian blacks 
are like the American Indians. They 
have a system of totems, or animal names 
which represent different tribes or in¬ 
dividuals and which signify a kind of 
relationship between the animal and the 
man or men. We found this out one day 
when Jimmy Booka told us a little legend 
about the origin of a group of stars which 
we call the Pleiades, but which is the 
“ Meamei ” to the blacks. “ Warrunnah 
the Bee,” he began—and of course we 
thought the story was about a bee until 
he explained that it was a totemic name— 
“ came home one day very tired and asked 
his parents for some food [Jimmy Booka 
called it “ durrie,” which is a dish made 
from “ doonburr ” seeds], but they would 
not give him any, so he flew into a rage 
and told them he would go away to a far 
country and live with strangers who 




185 


Growing Up 

would not try to starve him. While he 
was in search of this new country, he saw 
a big storm coming up, and he built him¬ 
self a shelter of boughs till it was over. 
As he was coming out, he saw seven 
young girls, who seemed quite friendly. 
4 What are your names? ’ he asked, and 
they replied, 4 We are the Meamei, the 
seven sisters.’ They were so beautiful 
that Warrunnah the Bee decided to try to 
steal one for a wife. He waited until he 
saw them all setting out in search of food 
with their yam-sticks in their hands; then 
he followed at a distance. He saw them 
stop at the nests of some ants. When 
they had unearthed a good supply of ants, 
they threw down their sticks and began 
to feast. While they were busy, Warrun¬ 
nah sneaked up and stole one of the 
switches. Of course, when the girls were 
again ready to set out for home, one had 
no stick. She stayed behind to look for it 
while the other six went back to camp. 


186 When 1 Was a Girl in Australia 

As soon as the coast was clear, Warrun- 
nah came out of his hiding-place and 
grabbed her round the waist. After a 
little struggle she was quite willing to be 
his wife. She even appeared to settle 
down quietly in her new life, but all the 
time she was wondering whether her six 
sisters had forgotten her or whether they 
were looking for her still. One day War- 
runnah could not get the camp-fire to 
burn. ‘ Go and get some bark off those 
pine-trees over there,’ he said to his wife, 
but she refused to go. ‘ If I cut the bark 
of a pine, you will never see me any more,’ 
she said. Warrunnah didn’t believe her. 
‘Do as I tell you,’ he said. ‘ If you try 
to run away, I will soon catch you again.’ 
So the Meamei took her knife in her hand 
and began to cut the bark. After the first 
chops on the tree Warrunnah heard no 
more sounds, and he went to see what had 
happened. As he drew near, he saw that 
the pine-tree was growing taller and 


187 


Growing Up 

taller and that his wife was clinging to 
its trunk. She did not answer when he 
called her. The tree grew higher and 
higher until it touched the sky, and then 
Warrunnah the Bee saw the six other 
Meamei looking out at their sister. He 
heard them calling her, and saw them 
draw her into the sky to live with them 
forever in the form of stars.” 

Some people think that the aboriginals 
are the lowest type of human beings in 
the world. Perhaps they are in some 
ways, but that does not mean that they 
have no tribal laws or customs. Their 
camps are governed by age-old laws, 
probably the oldest in the world, and they 
have tales and legends to explain almost 
every form of life. 

When our holiday was over, Daddy and 
I were sorry to say good-bye to Jimmy 
Booka. It was almost impossible, listen¬ 
ing to him, to believe that the aboriginals 
were a savage, ruthless people. As we 


188 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

were going home in the train, I asked 
Daddy if he thought the tales of their 
cruelty to the early settlers were true. 

“ Yes, little maid,” he said. “ The 
pioneers who opened up the back country 
had to be always prepared for the raids 
and attacks of the blacks. You see, the 
first white men that most of those blacks 
ever saw were escaped prisoners and the 
gangs of bushrangers who were forced 
inland sometimes. Those men were all 
brutal by nature, not only to their own 
people, but to the poor blacks whom they 
met as well. It naturally followed that 
the abos hated white men and fought them 
all indiscriminately. The peaceful settlers 
who followed often paid dearly for the 
cruelty of the first white men.” 

When we reached home, although we 
were all better for our change and rest, 
we did not find conditions greatly altered. 
The war was still on. News from France 
was still unhappy, and no one could for- 


Growing Up 189 

get that those whom he loved were on the 
battlefields. 

But how beautiful my world seemed!— 
the world of the bush and the cliff, where 
I went to escape the war and its result 
which had fallen upon our home like a 
shadow. 

In tiny crannies of moss-grown’rocks, 
hidden away from the heat of the sun, I 
could find little gentian-blue orchids, like 
flowers from a fairy’s garden. 

The Australian Christmas-tree bloomed, 
a mass of pale pink flowers that turned 
to deepest red before they withered 
among the shredded-looking leaves. 

Below the precipice the waves crept up 
and splashed over the rocks, making the 
sweetest music I have ever heard—just 
exactly as they had done before the war 
came. I used to think about that, too, 
and wonder what was the best thing to 
do with life while we had it; devastating 
things like wars and sickness could hap- 


190 When 1 Was a Girl in Australia 

pen so suddenly. Goodness only knows 
how many questions I asked myself, or 
what queer things I thought, sitting in 
the darkness under the flame-tree boughs. 
But one thing I always knew—it was 
unbelievably lovely to be there! 

In the bush there were always new 
things to find. It is no wonder that the 
botanist who sailed with Captain Cook 
went back to the ship after his first 
glimpse of the coast of New South Wales 
and said, “ We will call the place Botany 
Bay.” Most of the flowers are unusual, 
too, like the famous waratah that grows 
on a stem facing up to the sky, with its 
petals, deep red like an old-fashioned 
table-cloth, turning back as chrysanthe¬ 
mums do, but each one stiff and unbend¬ 
ing instead of soft like other petals. 

While it is true that a number of Aus¬ 
tralian flowers have no perfume, many 
have clean, medicinal scents, and some, of 
course, have a very real fragrance. The 


Growing Up 191 

air at the brink of the sea is often laden 
with the lovely odor of a knobby, color¬ 
less little flower that grows on a fiercely 
bladed reed, like frog-spawn clinging to 
water-grass. And nobody who has ever 
smelled the daphne tree in flower on a 
moonlight night can ever forget it. 

Never in my life had I loved the bush 
as I loved it then. If I sat very still, the 
little grey garter-snakes came out and 
basked in the sun without seeing me. 
Yellow-breasted robins built their nests 
and never seemed to mind me watching. 

As I looked down from the cliff, the 
sea was limpid in the vibrant summer air, 
and tinted like an opal with a blue that 
graded into green where the seaweeds 
grew among the rocks. 

Japanese sailors, with boxes over their 
heads so that they could look through the 
glass in front and not hurt their eyes 
when they dived, searched hour after hour 
for some mysterious shell-fish which they 


192 When I Was a Girl in Australia 

cooked in miniature fires along the shore. 

For a long time I used to think they were 
diving for pearls. 

Sometimes there were little peacock- 
blue jelly-fish in the waves. We called 
them “ Portuguese men-o’-war,” or, more 
commonly, “ bluebottles,” and they could 
sting like mosquitoes if we hit them when 
we were in the water. 

From the picture of the foreshores, I 
used to lift my eyes to the scene beyond 
the nearer headlands—to the steamers 
and the liners in the distance, as they 
slowly disappeared into the wide Pacific 
through the gateway of the Heads. 
Where were they bound? I used to won¬ 
der. To what far country were they sail¬ 
ing? To the Argentine? To Borneo? 

To America? Would there ever come a 
day when I, too, would sail across the sea 
to another world, and if I did, what would 
I find? 

THE END 

Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 

Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 

Treatment Date: October 2016 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN COLLECTIONS PRESERVATION 

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Sydney harbor bridge 

Officially Opened In 1932 




































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